Story of the last few months

Story of the so-called JAS quater in the corporate world…

• I’m having a taste of the corporate world, nice to experience the things in reality that I’ve read in the books about the corporate world. It’s still too much for me to adapt to, so I’ve decided to give it a shot for a longer time to be able to draw some final conclusion about it.

• I’m living in Bangalore city (which has a lovely weather), and I’m actually fascinated observing how business run at a large scale (so ineffiecient, and yet growing in the grand scheme of things), the sheer number of B2B companies that exist, the number of people being paid so much that they end up spending on pointless things, and how much luck dependent things become when you work anywhere.

• Anwyays, my job involves all-things-not-python like Java (Spring, Vertx) to node.js to React. Man, I have started to miss snake_case now.

• After countless number of retakes of countless number of smaller parts, I got my first ever video course published 🎉 It’s titled Hands-on Reinforcement Learning with Tensorflow.

• Realized that I need to work on my dull and typical Indian accent which may bore the viewers. By the way, it was a hell of an experience, and now my respect for those creating digital content (videos, articles, etc) has increased by leaps and bounds. On an average, it used to take 2–3 hours for me to prepare for and record just a 7–10 min video.

• Finished GSoC mentoring. My student Ishan did an excellent work without much of my help (which was a good thing for both of us :p)

• Finished GSSoC mentoring, unfortunately couldn’t utilize the opportunity to develop wtfpython-web due to the lack of time.

• Got a couple of opportunities to write books, couldn’t convert them, sigh.

• My session made to the Mozfest this time (finally!)

but one more thing happened -_-

• My VISA application got rejected :(

• And with that, my Amazing session (I don’t usually vouch for my stuff, but I’ve spent days on crafting this session), my Qatar Airways flight bookings (they costed money), plan to have a creative selfie near Stonehenge, meetup at Google office in London, two days of exploring London, one day stay in Edinburgh, all went in vain… Damn, that hurts till now (probably one of the most disappointing things of the last few months after the OpenAI rejection).

• Worked on a couple of guest blogs, none of them has been published till now unfortunately.

• I lost weight, at least 6kgs (which is not a good thing for me), my fitness levels declined too (lack of time again), but on a brighter side I somehow managed to run 6.8 miles one fine morning (felt really good).

• The dust covered books in my open closet stare me everyday, and I hate myself of not being able to take out time to read them.

• Attended one hackathon just to realize that I’ve lost affinity for such events. It’s highly unlikely that I’m going to participate in an Indian hackathon any soon (btw I have a blog post regarding some hackathon fluff in my todoist, would release it soon).

• I did managed to travel to some places in the weekend (3 to be precise), they turned out to be some of the very few peaceful moments in the past few months.

On a side-note, I’ve become more comfortable being alone and having less friends. I’ve started to feel more content after accepting some hard truths about my personality, the way I behave and the way I look.

What I’m expecting from the next few months (the OND quarter)?

• Learn about Design practices, Spring Framework, and frontend frameworks like React (that’s what my job demands, and I want to be super good at them).

• Reconsider my choices to guest blog. It a highly investing work, with a lot of things depending on the whims of the publisher (IBM recently put down one of my blog posts without any justification). If time allows, I’m planning to start a bigger blog of my own pretty soon (and trust me, it’s going to be quite informative and fun to read at the same time).

• Take my Deep Learning understanding to next level. I’ve already completed few MOOCs and done some research projects related to Machine Learning and specifically Deep Learning. But over the time, I’ve felt the need to brush up my basic over and over again. So I’ve enrolled myself into Deep Learning Nanodegree, hopefully this would fill in the gaps in my current understanding of the field (if any).

• A long trip back to home for Diwali 🏡

• Improve my fitness, and hopefully run for 10 miles some morning :p

• Build some bigger self-projects of mine (I bought 4–5 domains corresponding to some ideas that I had in my mind last year, and it sucks that I haven’t used them till now). What the f*ck python also needs one update.

• Explore the world of finance (need to learn the rules and hacks of this so-called game “investing”).

• Finish Westworld and Mr. Robot (a very very long overdue, hopefully will manage some time to watch some TV series now).

• Read some books related to fields I wanted to explore for long (Genetics, Neurology, Finance, and Psychology)

• Disappoint myself for expecting so much and not being able to achieve even one-third of it.

That’s all for this update. Until next time…