Oral Ersoy Dokumaci

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Senior Machine Learning Engineer at The Burning Glass Institute, building ML and NLP systems for labor market analytics.

I have comb-shaped skills: deeper experience in Python, Software Engineering, ML/NLP, and Game Theory, with exposure to Cloud Architecture and Engineering, AI Systems Design, Data Engineering, and MLOps.

I run a YouTube channel, Python In Production, bridging the gap between writing Python and shipping production-ready Python. All videos also live here as blog chapters.

In a previous life, I was a quant in finance. I went into the tech side of quantitative finance with a goal of picking up transferable engineering and machine learning skills. I worked on high-frequency trading and market-neutral hedge fund strategies, where I was lucky enough to be surrounded by great engineers and learned the trade (pun intended) by doing. Once I’d done that, I went back to being surrounded by great economists at The Burning Glass Institute. I find it refreshing now to be working at a nonprofit after years where profit was the only objective.

I’ve also been doing my PhD on the side in Economics. My research includes game theory, matching theory, and decision theory.

Recent

Why the Hardest Concept for Python Devs Is Concurrency: asyncio vs threading vs multiprocessing

29 July 2026·23 mins

Concurrency Production Python Software-Engineering

Concurrency is arguably the hardest concept for Python developers, because the important ideas already assume you understand the operating system underneath. In this chapter, we start from the kernel and system calls, build up processes, threads, race conditions, and the GIL, then work out when to reach for asyncio, threading, or multiprocessing, why a GPU beats a CPU on the same arithmetic, and how to get better at concurrent programming.

After 7 Years in Production, Scarf Has Reluctantly Moved Away from Haskell... to Python

22 July 2026·5 mins

AI Haskell Production Python Typing

Scarf ran Haskell in production for seven years and is now moving to Python.

PhD in Python Functions

2 July 2026·39 mins

Functions Production Python Software-Engineering

From kindergarten to PhD, this may be the most comprehensive chapter on Python functions. We start with the basics of defining and calling functions, learn how to write them well, then learn closures, decorators, recursion, and generators, all the way to theory of computation and how CPython executes functions under the hood.

How Python Works Under the Hood: Control Flow and Bytecode

12 June 2026·15 mins

Control-Flow Production Python Software-Engineering

Every if, loop, break, and continue in Python compiles down to the same tricks. We visualize the Python bytecode behind the control flow to understand how Python really works under the hood.

Python 3.15's New frozendict vs dict

31 May 2026·13 mins

Data-Types Production Python Software-Engineering

In Part 3 of Python’s data types, we cover dict and the new frozendict, Python 3.15’s built-in immutable mapping, plus how to choose the right data type for the job.

Python list vs tuple vs set vs frozenset

31 May 2026·16 mins

Data-Types Production Python Software-Engineering

Working with many objects at once requires the right container. In Part 2 of Python’s data types, we cover str, bytes, tuple, list, bytearray, set, and frozenset.