Going from 0-1| October 2021
This month was really focused on going from no knowledge/experience in a subject to getting started and taking vital first steps. Here's what I did this October:
I launched the website for MiruDAO, which is a decentralized autonomous organization to open-source and bring more funding to neurotech research
I started building in public for 30 days (not stopping at just 30 days)
Took my first step in learning machine learning
Theme of the Month: Building In Public
This month I focused on expanding my reach over Twitter by building in public. It was honestly a really memorable experience and I don't plan on stopping. I was able to publicly document my growth which felt strangely therapeutic. It might've been a mix of getting other people to weigh in on my thoughts and opinions, as well as just journaling my thoughts and progress in general.
Before this challenge, I never really journaled as I didn't want to set aside time to do it. But now, I'm semi-journaling and also expanding my reach. It's a win-win so there was little friction for me to write most days.
If you're interested in reading more about the past month, make sure you follow me on twitter and check out my tweets!
Building MiruDAO
For the past 2 months I've been heavily interested in disrupting Academia. Personally, I don't think the way that academia functions makes sense. I'll touch on this more later in length when I write an article about it.
I wrote a little bit about this on my Twitter but essentially I had the idea of a decentralized platform for publishing research but that idea flopped (I explain why in the thread). Naturally, I still had the desire to disrupt Academia so I started looking for other problems where my mentor pointed out the massive shortage of funding in Academia. I already knew this, but what I didn't know was how it was being solved...
Currently, VitaDAO is using Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (writing an article about that!) to solve this problem but for longevity. After learning more about DAOs, my gears started turning and I believed that this would be great for neurotech.
I partnered up with my good friend Aleem and started to build our brand. We fell in love with the name MiruDAO (Miru = explore in Japanese) as the mission of our DAO is to help explore the brain through neurotech. In just a couple of days we were able to come up with a website, and a one-pager describing our DAO and we are currently looking for proposals to fund!
If you are a neurotech or neuroscience researcher and would love to get some funding, check out our website and join the discord.
By the way... the story behind MiruDAO is coming up soon. November is content month.
Skill of the Month: Learning Machine Learning From The Ground Up
Yeah machine learning was a lot harder than I expected. I'm really excited for the challenge though. There's a lot of background knowledge that I'm currently picking up and it feels super rewarding to learn something new everyday.
In this tweet I was following Udacity's Intro to Deep Learning course where I built a Style-Transfer CNN for the first time (you can totally tell it was for the first time). This was just the beginning though.
Afterwards I realized that I didn't have a great grasp on what's happening when I was using these ML libraries. The field as a whole is so developed, that it's super easy to "know" ML but really only be great at reciting boilerplate PyTorch code and not understand what's really happening.
To counteract this, I decided to build a neural network from scratch using nothing by Python and Numpy. So far, it's going really well and I've been following Sentdex's book which has been a tremendous help.
Watch out for a lot of ML content coming out soon.
Imaginative ML Projects & How to Build Them
This is my first ML related piece of content. In the future there's going to be a lot more coming out this month (hopefully). Feedback is really appreciated!
“Rest at the end, not in the middle”
This quote is from Kobe Bryant. He's a basketball player so famous for his work ethic and hustle mentality, that it was given it's own name, "Mamba Mentality." Over this month, and the next month I hope to embody Kobe's work ethic. My goal is that within the next month I push out loads of content and projects and save my rest/fun for the very end of the sprint.
Rest has a time and place, but that time is not now. Right now I should hustle and build my foundation.
What's Happening November?
Hopefully, I'll be building out more of MiruDAO and learning a lot more about ML. My goal is that in November I have:
Built an ML project (Style Transfer or something else)
Pitched MiruDAO to influential people
Created 4+ pieces of content
I'll see you in November! If you want more frequent updates, follow me on Twitter!