Building ML in the Dark: A Survival Guide for the Solo Practitioner

Photo by Boitumelo on Unsplash No GPU cluster. No data team. No ML platform. Here’s what actually ships. Most ML content is written for teams that have things. A labelled dataset. An MLOps platform. A data engineer who answers Slack messages. A GPU budget that someone has already approved. You probably don’t have those things. You’re embedded in a product or analytics team, you were handed a vague mandate to “do something with ML,” and you have a laptop, a free-tier cloud account, and colleagues who think pandas is the animal. This post is for you. Not a roadmap - a survival guide.