Podcasts · Math Academy

#4, Part 2 – Knowledge Graph Engineering: Mental Models & War Stories

3 Dec 2025 · 1 h 20 min

What we covered:

– Building a knowledge graph is like city planning & road construction. Too many prerequisites leading into a single topic creates a cognitive traffic jam.

– Elegantly rewiring a live knowledge graph: the evolution of our tooling and automatic validations. How to avoid staging servers & migrations and NOT have it blow up in your face.

– UI work takes time and adds complexity, so we spend it on the customer. Internal tools are almost entirely command-line; clickable buttons are for customers.

– Justin's transition from research coding to real-time systems. He started with mathy, notebook-driven quant code and had to learn production engineering the hard way. Once he did, it was a massive level-up.

– Alex's plan for dealing with "content papercuts" - small issues that pile up. Inspired by Amazon’s “papercuts team.”

– Our upcoming differential equations course, the last course in the core undergrad engineering math sequence.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Building a production-grade knowledge graph is like city planning and road construction

00:07:26 - Elegantly rewiring a live knowledge graph: the evolution of our tooling and automatic validations

00:24:47 - Justin's transition from research coding to real-time systems

00:44:51 - Alex's plan for dealing with "content papercuts" - small issues that pile up

00:58:02 - Our upcoming differential equations course

Follow on X:

Math Academy - https://x.com/_MathAcademy_

Justin Skycak - https://x.com/justinskycak

Jason Roberts - https://x.com/exojason

Alexander Smith - https://x.com/ninja_maths

The episode on the publisher’s site ↗ (opens in a new tab)