Week 29, 2021

“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.– Ernest Hemingway

The last three to four weeks have been defeating. Sorry to start this blog on a sad note but it’s true. I have bitten off more that I can chew but I have to finish all the things that I have started.

Work ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Sunverge opened its office a while ago. I have to go into the office everyday and I choose to bike to work. The commute is 15 miles round trip. It a lot of fun to bike to work but I am too tired at the end of the day for any productive hours. A lot of interesting things happening at work most of which I obviously can’t share here. One thing I can talk about is that we hired another employee to help with business side of things. Last week I was tasked with helping him through everything. It was a new experience for me.

Projects ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Machine Learning Bootcamp

There’s a blast of information coming at me faster than I can absorb it all. It is overwhelming and unsatisfying. Don’t get me wrong, I am thrilled to be learning all ML/AI stuff and getting hands on experience with it but I just wish I had more time to sit with it and enjoy. I am playing catchup with all the modules and assignments. I submitted the mid-term exam today and I feel like I couldn’t have done worse on the test. One good news is that we have started out Capstone project on a good note. It’s a partner project meaning that I have teamed up with a guy from Rome, Italy to ## work on the project. We have picked an industry-sponsored project of Financial Fraud detection from Ibotta. For ethical reasons, we are using another old anonymized dataset to build and deploy our model. The partner project is a good practice in collaboration and communication.

CEEW – Sustainable Mobility Research Assistant

Till yesterday, I thought I made good progress and came very close to finishing the CEEW project but the web app completely broke as I was deploying it in production. This is how the dashboard is supposed to look like. It works fine on my local system but I came across a host of problems while deploying it on Heroku. I spent 7-hours on Saturday trying to debug this issue after a 6-hour long live bootcamp session. But I failed.

Books ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech |  Sally Smith Hughes

I barely read 10-30 pages of this book in the last 3-4 weeks.

Fitness ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

I haven’t been focusing much on fitness and that includes nutrition. All the things I am involved in leave me tired and after that I don’t want to go to the gym and struggle or restrict unhealthy eating habits. It’s obviously affecting my health. I have been convincing myself that age is on my side and these bad eating habits (or lack of weight lifting) will not punish me in the short run. I know I am wrong in assuming so. I hope that I am able to focus more on fitness next week.