What’s on ye old plate

I’ve got a lot of stuff cooking. I’m chasing a bunch of interests and my own professional improvement. To name a few,

On that last point, my wife recently gave birth to our 4 week old daughter. I’ve got 8 weeks parental leave from work (thanks, GLG!) and I had some crazy thought I could leverage that time and really dig in on ML. While I have been able to do some stuff, this kiddo is way more work than I remembered (she’s daughter #3). Most of the time, I’m a glorified heat rock for this little lizard to coil up on.

I’m not squandering a moment though and trying to maintain as much learning immersion as possible. When I’m doing one of my many parental duties, I’ve got YouTube running in the background playing introductory videos about machine learning, statistics and math topics. I’ll probably make a post sharing some of my favs.

One quick one I’ve been loving is 3Blue1Brown’s Essence of Linear Algebra. It’s a visual tour of operations like transformation and scaling that I think is going to be key to building intuition about how this math works. It’s quickly expanded my understanding of vectors and how they relate to some of these machine learning parameters that features hundreds of vector values. Definitely check it out.

Sometimes there are things that unlock my understanding that could be useful to others (like the aforementioned YouTube series). I’ll try to condense that into some TIL tidbit that I can quickly blog about. I’d tweet it but…I just never got into Twitter. Maybe that will change but I’m not holding my breath about it. So far I’ve only used it to complain to companies when I can’t get good customer service.