I know, I know... MNIST dataset has been used in all kind of examples about machine learning. However, when I was starting out, I didn't find any example that was simple enough to understand and complex enough to don't be too simplistic.
Although MNIST is old-fashioned, I think is a good place to start because it introduces the core fundamentals of machine learning and at the same time, it combines other necessary skills such as data manipulation and visualization. So I decided to build this simple model together with an explanation for new practitioners who can't find any good examples.
I throw in some jokes to make it lighter. All of them are pretty average, so expect a normal distribution of your laughs.