2018 Review
It’s the beginning of 2019, and as I’m establishing as tradition, this post is a review of 2018.
In 2018, I completed my masters at Edinburgh. I moved to Sweden to start a new job involving machine learning and data engineering. I also wrote 38 blog posts this year!
Blog posts
During the month of May, I had a month off for studying and finals. I studied Machine Learning, went to coffee shops, read, ran, and wrote blog posts. I couldn’t complain!
Here are a few posts:
Small ML projects
- Neural net embeddings that classify climate surprisingly well! (2018/06/11)
- Bayesian ranking Edinburgh coffee shops (2018/05/27)
- Embedding book topics from the Seattle Public Library (2018/05/16)
Big personal software projects
- Managing neural net experiments for my research. (2018/08/28)
- How I studied for my masters. (2018/05/06)
- My master’s thesis on seq2seq. (2018/12/30)
ML Concepts
- Minimizing KL Divergence using TensorFlow (2018/12/27)
- Alpha Recursion in Hidden Markov Models (2018/05/02)
- Gaussian Processes (2018/05/18)
I also posted on data science tech (einsum),
data engineering tech (DBpedia),
graphics (xml.etree.elementtree Cheatsheet),
and places and events (Narvik, Norway and Kiruna, Sweden).
I also started writing some posts as Jupyter notebooks.
Places and events
Home bases
- Edinburgh, UK
- Uppsala, Sweden (commuting to Stockholm)
Events
- The Beast from the East made Edinburgh look different!
- I took one of my exams in the Playfair Library Hall in Edinburgh.
- The Edinburgh Festival happened while I was writing my thesis! It felt like a different city.
New places
Some new places I’ve visited are
- Cambridge and Glasgow in the UK
- The new cheese factory in Tillamook, Oregon. I am now the proud owner of this foam cheese representing my nostalgia for Oregon.
Favorites
Books
I set an ambitious reading goal for 2018 and totally missed it (56/70 books). I’ll settle for 56 books!
In no particular order, some books that stuck with me are
- Geek Love - Katherine Dunn
- Beloved - Toni Morrison
- As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
- Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Maria Machado
- Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin
- Neuromancer - William Gibson (and I reread Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.)
- The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin
- The Color Purple - Alice Walker
- Exit West - Mohsin Hamid
For non-fiction
- So You Want to Talk About Race - Ijeoma Oluo
- The Book of Why - Judea Pearl
I also read Trainspotting in Edinburgh and American Psycho in New York City.
Podcasts
In addition to podcasts from last year’s list:
- More Perfect
- Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway
- The Guardian’s Audio Long Reads and Today in Focus
- And not sure why Lovett or Leave It wasn’t on last year’s list.
Music
Study albums
- Archipelago by Hidden Orchestra (Edinburgh!)
- Every Country’s Sun by Mogwai (Glasgow!)
Running albums
Etc
- Commute time in late-2018: ~80 minutes
- Number of Edinburgh-Stockholm or Stockholm-Edinburgh flights: 11
From one of the Edinburgh-Stockholm flights, here are some Norwegian fjords, an aerial view of Oslo, and an in-flight video of Mt. Hood, Oregon.
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