Starting School Again | September 2021
In September, I started up school again, dove deep in Machine Learning, published an article on a project that I've been working on and started building in public.
Theme of the Month: Rest
Holy shit is school tiring. I'm going to school in person for the first time in about 2 years and the shift in routine and energy levels is staggering. Although I do enjoy it, there are still a lot of downsides. I found myself coming back from home and feeling super tired after a long day of school. Everyone is so noisy, and distracting, it's hard to find pockets of quiet where someone isn't talking about drama or just yelling at the top of their lungs for no reason.
This resulted in me valuing my breaks a lot more. When I go home, I reallllllly enjoy taking a break and just chilling for an hour before I get back to work and have that separation from school and personal work. I feel really great at home when I am able to just work in quiet on something that I really love. In school, that rarely happens as there's always just so much going on.
Skill of the Month: Starting My ML Journey!
After staying in neurotech for a year, I decided that I wanted a change. Machine Learning was an obvious next step after being surrounded by it for so long and it's practicability.
I started off by taking Udacity's Intro to Deep Learning Course and I really love it. It sounds funny, but I really love learning about the math and the intricacies of each neural network and why it works mathematically. It's still a challenge for me though since I don't have enough math knowledge yet, but it's pretty intuitive and there's a lot of high quality content online for ML (sadly something that lacks for neurotech IMO).
So far, with Udacity's course I've built a CNN to turn a picture of myself into a painting, and a LSTM to predict new text from a book. I look forward to new, more complex projects in the future and really learning a lot about ML. If you have any resources that helped you, send them my way! I really appreciate it.
Building an EEG-Shazam
This project was in the waiting for a long time; It's finally here! Read all about my struggles with this project, and how it works.
Starting TKS Activate!
As I'm sure most of you guys already know, I'm part of TKS. For the past year I was part of Innovate, their first year program focused on emerging technology. Now I'm part of Activate, their second-year program focused on solving the world's biggest problems. It's shaping up to be a fun year, and I can't wait to see my growth.
October #buildinpublic Challenge
Micheal (Director for TKS Activate) started up a #buildinpublic challenge for all of October. Although I was skeptical at first, I'm really enjoying the process of building in public and growing my brand on many different platforms. I'm planning on blasting out a lot more content monthly, and (almost) daily tweet threads for you guys to keep up with me.
“To get paid in the future, live in the future.”
Throwing another Naval quote at you this month. Although since I'm not looking for crazy amounts of money, I look at this quote as "To bring value in the future, live in the future." This quote was a really great reminder for me to keep compounding, keep building, and keep thinking.
My main insight from this quote was that in order provide value in the future, I need to envision the future, come back to reality, and build what's missing.
I feel like this quote is going to come back to inspire me another day, I hope it inspires you too.
What's Happening October?
I'll be building in public for all of October. If you want to know what's happening with me in October, I suggest you find out ;)