What a time to be alive! 
Just a few hours from the First lecture of Part 2 and I thought I should share my thoughts again here.
I spent the last few weeks as planned:
I don’t know how but somehow I managed to pull together all of the things that I had planned to do. Maybe it’s because I kept my hopes on the lower end but that’s okay I think I will make sure not to wear myself out this time. During the last Part 2 runs, I would try to run too hard to keep up and then just fall flat on my face and give up on the lectures. I’m determined not to do the same this time.
- Managed to complete 3 runs of fastai, 2 all thanks to the twimlai meetups and 1 because, I had free weekends
- I think I’ve started to get there
- So far I’ve kept up with the Lesson discussions from part 1 and I hope to catch up or keep up with part 2 discussions. Special points if I can keep up in real time, lesser points if I get scared and don’t keep up and come back later.
- I’ve been doing a few souce code deep dives during meetups and presenting papers.
- I’m still yet to go back to the mini-ideas and start re-factoring. Mostly because I’m still adding more ideas around it.
A few goals that I’ll settle on for now:
- Watch the livestreams live, keep up with the discussions and not just nod to the nb cells but actually ensure that I understand them okay-okay for the first run, I do plan to come back to the lessons later so I just hope to have a better idea than just feel alienated.
- I’ve promised to do a paper-a-week summary along with 1 ML hero interview each week, Luckily I teamed up with @lesscomfortable who has been doing a paper a day summary and it led me to writing 8 paper summaries in the past 6 days I hope to stick to 1 paper a week after the course starts if not with a speed that is as intense speed as of now.
- Presenting lesson ideas: I’ve enjoyed learning via presenting via blogging and I’ve really started to realise that by doing a mini-talk during the DS India meetups (hosted by @aakashns) or during the TWiMLAI meetups has really help me deepen my understanding. I’ve somehow managed to do ~30 hours (my goal for 2019 is 100 hours) of presentations and I want to keep doing 1 mini talk or presentation on the ideas that I learn in part 2 each week.
- Capstone Project: I’m still yet to fall in love with an idea or a paper that I really want to implement. Again, I’m just a CS undergrad student so that makes me a boring student with neither coding expertise (which is ofcourse my fault) or a cool background. So I’m still waiting for my shower thought but I’ll keep on working on mini-ideas and really come back to refactoring them in the future.
Another idea I’ve realised that I’d really want to stick to is: ensuring that my setup and DL env is clean. I’ve done house cleaning today and updated both my machines to latest fastai and pytorch versions. Setup 2 env(s)- A bleeding edge one, everything installed from source and another for reliability (because I mess up, not because source installation is very hard) where I keep everything conda installed.
Again, We’re all learning to learn so I’ll be thankful for any suggestions/corrections to my approach.
Also for anyone who made it through my boring ideas, incase you’d want to tackle some compute heavy idea and would need some GeForce, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me 