Month: December 2018

Dear 2018, you won’t be missed!

A year is a significant period of time in human terms. There is plenty of opportunities for good and bad times. But when we look back at it, we usually have an overall feeling of how good or bad the year was.

Most of my years tend to be either good or average. But 2018 was one of the worst ones I can remember. Sure, plenty of good happened too, but an overall stream of stuff that’s not too great, made it into what it was.

Just a few points that made it so:

  • Lost a few family members. I guess this is kind of expected, the older everyone gets. But still.
  • Nearly lost or got separated from more family members (for a variety of reasons, like health conditions, car accidents, government paperwork, etc).
  • Apparently, nearly kicked it myself. Although it didn’t feel like, but the doctor was pretty sure and I don’t have any reasons not to trust his professional opinion.
  • Had to celebrate my 40th birthday sober as a judge. That’s a first one in a quarter of a century, I think.
  • Had to attend the first funeral in ages (my friend’s father passed away).Had one of those “knife in the back” situations. Which was probably more of my own doing or perspective.
  • Had a whole roller coaster of financial surprises. Mostly downstream though.
  • And on and on it goes.

The stuff at work has been crazy. We’ve been delivering more and faster than even before. (Gladly we managed to nearly double the development team starting in the second half of the year.) When I’m thinking about it all, I often get the racing scene from The Fate of the Furious movie playing in my head. With the only exception that our race didn’t start this year. Think of it more like 3 minutes 15 seconds into this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdAsC_1sH1g

Even towards the last few days of the year, 2018 tried to give me both a flu and a severe toothache. Gladly, I got nearly immune to this year’s treats.

Overall, one of my favorite movies scenes helps to summarize this year. Imagine that the year 2018 is sitting behind the desk here, and that’s me who’s talking from the shoes of Gust Avrakatos:

With all of that, I’m happy to report that I’ve pulled it through. Once again, huge thanks to all my family, friends, and colleagues who helped and supported me in a variety of ways. Additionally, special thanks goes to all bartenders, waiters and waitresses, and alcohol manufacturers, without who this year would be absolutely impossible.

Here’s a huge cheers for a much better 2019! Happy New Year to you and your loved ones. And I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy!

Machine Learning 101 by Jason Mayes

There is a tonne of information both online and offline on the subjects of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Some resources provide just the bare minimum introductory information. Others dive deep into specifics. But I haven’t seen one that is as easy to follow as Jason Mayes’ Machine Learning 101 slides deck.

It’s so easy in fact that is probably useful to even the non-technical people who want to know how this whole AI thing works. I particularly liked how the slides are separated into green background for general knowledge and blue background for in-depth knowledge, making them easy to skip. I also find the balance between the details in the slides and the further reading / watching resources to be just right.

Programmer Playing Cards

I have recently blogged about the Faces of Open Source project. That’s a great initiative. But here’s another one, with a lot more practical approach – Programmer Playing Cards. It is a deck of playing cards, featuring people who influenced the world of computer programming in a variety of ways. Each card has a photo of a person, his or her name, what was the influence, and, as a nice touch, a quote from that person.

Here’s an example with Larry Wall.

More examples as well as instructions on how to get these cards are here.