Léonel Vodounou, personal website

Source of vleonel-junior.github.io: my academic profile, projects, and a blog of notes on machine learning, large language models and the mathematics behind them. The site is bilingual, English at / and French under /fr/.

Contents

• Profile: education, experience, publications, projects, certifications, community involvement, and a downloadable CV.
• Articles: standalone posts, such as a guide to descriptive statistics with interactive figures.
• Reading notes: chapter-by-chapter notes on Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) by Sebastian Raschka.
• Article series: a five-part series on Logic Tensor Networks, from grounding symbols in tensors to a semi-supervised MNIST case study.

Stack

• Astro 5, static site generation, with MDX content collections
• Tailwind CSS 4 and its typography plugin
• KaTeX, through remark-math and rehype-katex, for formulas
• Preact for the interactive figures
• Supabase for article comments, and Buttondown for the newsletter

Getting started

Requires Node.js 18 or later.

npm install
npm run dev        # development server on http://localhost:4321
npm run build      # production build in dist/
npm run preview    # serve the production build

Comments need a Supabase project. Set these variables in a .env file at the root; without them the site builds and runs, with comments disabled:

PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL=...
PUBLIC_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY=...

Project structure

src/
├── components/     article layout, table of contents, comments, figures
├── content/
│   ├── blog/       articles, one file per language in en/ and fr/
│   └── dossiers/   reading notes and series, one folder per dossier
├── data/           profile content: education, experience, projects, ...
├── i18n/           interface strings and language helpers
├── layouts/        base HTML layout
├── pages/          routes, English at the root and French under fr/
├── styles/         global styles and theme tokens
└── views/          page templates shared by both languages
public/             images, documents and the CV
cv/                 LaTeX source of the CV

Writing content

Articles

An article is written once per language, under the same file name: src/content/blog/en/<slug>.mdx and src/content/blog/fr/<slug>.mdx. If a translation is missing, the other language falls back to the existing version.

---
title: "Descriptive statistics"
description: "One or two sentences shown in listings and link previews."
pubDate: 2026-03-26
author: "Léonel VODOUNOU"
category: "Foundations"
tags: ["Statistics", "Machine Learning"]
lang: "en"
---

Optional fields: image (cover for listings), readTime (minutes, otherwise estimated) and draft: true to keep an article out of the site.

Reading notes and series

A dossier groups chapters in src/content/dossiers/<dossier>/en/ and fr/. Its title, description, chapter list and source notice are declared in src/data/dossiers.ts, with kind: "reading-notes" for notes on a book or kind: "series" for a series of my own articles. Each chapter file sets dossier, chapter and order in its frontmatter, along with the article fields above.

Formulas and figures

Inline formulas use $...$. Display formulas put the $$ delimiters on their own lines:

$$
\mathcal{G}(x) \in \mathbb{R}^{n}
$$

A $$...$$ written on a single line is rendered as an inline formula. Images in articles open full screen on click.

Deployment

Every push to main builds the site and publishes it to GitHub Pages through the workflow in .github/workflows/. The Supabase variables are read from the repository secrets.

Contact

• Email: vleoneljunior@gmail.com
• LinkedIn: Léonel Junior Sêdjro VODOUNOU
• X: @leonelvodounou
• GitHub: vleonel-junior