About me - Avi(ad) Shalom
My name is Aviad, a blogger and a "side hustler" (hoping that one day soon it will lead me to be a full-time entrepreneur). I hold a degree in Computer Science from Ben-Gurion University and have eight years of industry experience .
These days, outside of work hours, I spend most of my time developing apps—to gain experience in, well, developing apps (😉) and entrepreneurship. Some of these projects are community-focused because nothing beats the feeling of building something from scratch to help someone else.
Here are some of the projects I've led and am currently leading:
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Recipe Grabber: A web service that summarizes recipes. It helps digital cookbook apps transform raw data into structured information. I’ve written about the motivation and the “how” behind it (this started in 2019, long before today’s AI buzz, but it uses a neural network trained on data my friends and I collected).
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Sched-Cracker: A small initiative that helped Etnahta, a hostel for at-risk youth, create shift schedules under complex rules. (Basically, it’s an NP-hard problem that finds a feasible schedule given different shift types, certifications, and constraints).
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Playground: An attempt to create a platform for app development during a bootcamp. (It didn’t quite take off—I’m writing a blog post with lessons learned from that).
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Sway-Way (current project): A platform for learning from text files—feel free to check it out on the website!
The common thread in everything I do, since 2019, is my love for and belief in AI. Love, because to this day I’m amazed that statistical machines work and achieve the unimaginable, developing human-like complexity (so how could I not be captivated?). Belief, because I think the transformative potential of this technology is justified and will continue—if I have anything to do with it, it’ll keep moving in a positive direction.
This site is also a blog! (For now, only in Hebrew) with the following principles:
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Thorough > Complex: I prefer breaking down the basics of a concept little by little in each post rather than throwing in a ton of jargon that readers won’t absorb after four paragraphs. For more complex ideas, I use examples and solid intuition. If I’ve sparked a reader’s curiosity about a subject, they can dive into it in one of the 200k places the internet offers.
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Personal > Dry: There’s no shortage of dry, technical content out there—and that’s fine; the world needs it! But I’ll lean on intuition, metaphors, and share my emotions (like when something stubbornly refused to work, and I got frustrated, etc.). If you’re sensing a bit of a conflict between this point and the first one, you’re right—but I’ll do my best to balance the two.
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Concise > Over-explained: Don’t expect a step-by-step checklist of how I did things. Instead, expect an explanation that captures the heart of the idea and inspires you to explore and experiment with it in your own way.
