Week 34, 2025
The highlight this week was definitely the Nashville-style hot chicken sandwich. I hadn’t been eating any meat for over 50 days (practising the month of Shraavan). This Friday the Shraavan month ended and I immediately went for my favority type of chicken - Nashiville hot fried chicken sandwich. For the whole week, I had been exercising great restraint in eating and putting in disciplined workouts. Hence, the one Friday dinner with fried chicken was delicious and guilt-free - making it more enjoyable even in memories.
Work ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Nothing exciting to share about work - which is sad to be honest. Work is slow (as compared to the first half of the year). I am tasked with a plaform migration project. I have until the end of the month to finish it (one more week left) and hence I have been procrastinating a lot. The leadership will soon get back to the drawing board to plan projects for the next year. My profile has surely been leaning more towards engineering (ML and MLOps) than data science (data pipelines, A/B testing, ad-hoc analysis). Given my profile, I wonder what new initiatives will be taken up for the next few quarters. I would be ecstatic if any Reinforcement Learning project is taken up. For the next week, I am going to create a pitch (2 minute presentation) and try to convince my manager to let me lead that project. I need to summon more agency to get this done.
Projects ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Reinforcement Learning
I made no tangible progress with RL this week. I’ll get some hands-on work done on RL in the next week.
Books ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
I started reading a new science fiction book. This one is based on Earth (in contrast to the last one) for a change and a less of an imaginative departure from everyday life. The year is 2044 and the author claims reality to be an ugly place. At page 20, the protagonist is about to dive into a virtual game called OASIS. Lot of exciting reading to follow.
Fitness ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
This was a very good week for fitness and nutrition.
- Gym: I worked out at the gym three times this week.
- Cycling: I biked about 25 minutes throughout the week.
- Nutrition: This was a particularly good week for nutrition. I soaked a variety of sprouts and had them before every meal as a protein and fibre source to control blood glucose spike - my cravings for sweet after meals have drastically reduced. I ate only twice everyday with no snacking in the middle and a fasting window of 14-16 hours almost everyday.