Fastai Book (Re)Reading Club

Hello,

Anybody interested in a support group for re-reading Fastai book? I am usually quite busy (two jobs, three kids) and a support and peer pressure help me to keep my resolutions.

My intention is to read one chapter each week, plus

(A) Do the questionnaire and post the answers somewhere. You do not have to answer everything but you are forbidden to read answers of others before posting (honorary code).
(B) Write a new piece of code to practice the given chapter. Or understanding fastai2 library. Or a blog post. Post the link somewhere to inspire the others in Re-reading Club.

Both (A) and (B) rules are not set in stone but my intention is to stick to the schedule as much as possible. If I find at least two other people to join me, I will create a table or form for posting the links.

There is no big price for getting to Chapter 20 other than the acquired knowledge and maybe a postcard :postbox: :slight_smile:

EDIT: I have created the spreadsheet. If you want to join, just put your name to the next free column

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Hey @czechcheck!
I don’t know how you manage the time, huge respect to you :smiley:

I’m currently hosting a weekly “reading group” for the book, we’re at chapter 3 (will read 4 this weekend), it’s exactly along the same lines.

More details: [MLT] fastbook Reading & Discussion Sessions (Saturdays 4-6 PM IST)

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Am interested

Thank you initiating this Petr. I am interested. Please keep me posted.

@init_27 @czechcheck great minds think alike! @init_27 4:00pm IST is 3:30am PST so I’m not awake for your meetup, but Molly & I are working on organizing at least 1 new group for PST and/or EST, same format. Thinking weekday evening or weekend morning, starting with Ch1 after a week off. If that’s of interest to anyone let me know on the post here: https://forums.fast.ai/t/lesson-8-official-topic/70494/230?u=gansme. Excited to continue this journey with you!

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@gansme I’d like to help with this Study Group.

Let me suggest this, please let me know what you think: Since MLT (An awesome community) is already running the study group, we can run 2 sessions for PT and IST. I can help co-host the PT ones along with you.

Happy to help in any way possible otherwise.

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I already started wikis (starting with chapter 1) for the questionnaire solutions for the chapters discussed in the course. Feel free to contribute! (if there’s something wrong, feel free to fix it!) I hope these help you in our re-reading journey :slight_smile:

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@Imolajay, @vikbehal : Perfect, we are (at least) three, so I have created the Google Sheet:

@ilovescience Thank you. I will check your wikis and somehow link them back, so others can check and contribute. I still believe it is important to answer at least some questions without peeking to the solution.

@init_27: Thank you for letting me know about the group. I will skip for now but maybe come for more advances chapters (I am located in Europe, so 4-6 PM IST works for me).

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I am late on a first week. That is not a good sign :slight_smile: My only excuse is I postponed reading the book because I was working on my LetterTokenizer (Chapters 10-11).

At the same time, I have to say that actually doing the questionnaires (and not just skimming the questions) improved my understanding of the text significantly and I will continue with this. I believe the process is more important than having 100% correct answers (at least for me):

As for a coding exercise, I have linked my previous Steve Job vs John Rambo recognizer for Chapter 2. There is no obvious coding exercise for Chapter 1, so I am linking my pull request to fastai2 repo (I believe there is a small bug in a TextBlock class).

@Imolajay, @vikbehal: How are you doing? Will you join or did you give up? (it is ok - I understand we all have so many things to do)

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