Wholeheartedly agree
I tried keeping a list as well a couple of times, but I would quickly fill the list up with a lot of things I thought were essential but really weren’t. Now I just keep a mental list of what to work on - this way I naturally revise what is on it by trying to remember it. I am unable to have too many things on it (usually one or two ) and things naturally fall off it without me even noticing
I have two little kids and a full time job as a rails dev (complex, legacy app) and my recent realization is that I have been going at this deep learning thing too hard. I should not be staying up till 2 AM and this combined with the observation that it’s rarely the issue that we genuinely do not have enough time but rather that we give time to the wrong things means I have to make some deeper life changes hopefully sooner then later
It seems quite obvious at this point that data science related things is what I want to do to greater or lesser extent in life, one way or another. Something strange is also happening through a couple of months of following Jeremy’s and Rachel’s advice very closely - I feel with enough time I am capable of tackling nearly any problem at a level that I think could be quite useful to potential employers. Not sure I have enough to show at this point to convey this to them though and also not fully convinced that doing this professionally at this point would be the way to go.
But I digress - I am currently working on making a deep learning submission to the favorita kaggle competition. Another lesson learned - I will not join a competition in forseeable future just a month before it finishes! Too little time to get to anything fun, okay-ish for learning but not compatible with my schedule at all. 11 days to go only so would like to finish this. I then have a couple of posts I already started that I would like to complete, including beginning a lessons learned from fast.ai lib series. I feel that those posts can be quite good so excited about getting them done, and at least writing down what I want to write and getting it out the door finally will be a good thing
And that is it really as for my plan. Once I make progress on those posts, I will either hop into a new kaggle comp if one launches, or will focus on finishing v2 lectures, or will write more posts including something fun on random forests, or will read the pandas book (Santa got me it for Christmas ) or the DL book by Chollet (I really liked the first couple of pages) - most likely will do some combination of the above sticking 98.9997% to fast.ai materials :). There is still the lin alg course I wanted to do. the 1.0003% of time will be given to reminding myself what works and not straying away too far as there are still so many fast.ai goodies I haven’t taken a closer look at.
As a side note (I think a lot of people might find this useful), there is this great podcast episode with creator of Ruby on Rails, David Hainemeier Hanson. He has a lot of good things to say about productivity and learning, I think I should listen to it again He highlights the value of uninterrupted code sessions and turning down noise in general. I got off Facebook entirely and I am amazed how much can be achieved via giving something uninterrupted attention for some period of time. Need to figure out how to use Twitter better (maybe unfollow a bunch of people / don’t randomly jump into reading it but check it a couple of times a day from my computer only). But a lot of good stuff there from David, would highly recommend this talk and in general his approach to programming (very welcoming to people new to coding and in general from various walks of life, have benefited from listening to him greatly myself).
Sorry about this disorganized post - will try to write a more coherent update speaking directly to the plan I outlined in earlier posts and how it is going sometime down the road, maybe once I have more to show in terms of posts, etc
Kids are slowly waking up so time to get the older one ready for kindergarten and in general get things going around here