My now page for January 2021
Inspired by Derek Siver’s suggestion on keeping a “now page” updated, I have decided I will do one a month. The now page will stay in the navigation above and will be transformed into a post once the month switches, leaving room for the next month’s one. This way it’ll be useful to me to have a better idea of things I do and get interested in, and their progress; I’ll try to be disciplined with this process. I’ve only decided to do this now, it is February, because I’ve only thought about it (once I discovered Derek’s site), so I am writing down the January version in retrospective. So here’s what I’ve been up to in January 2021.
Moving home & sorting it
This has been by large the biggest project of the month and the thing that took most of my energies. We bought a flat, our first, and we got the go ahead to move in. Because the new flat is near the old one and we didn’t own almost any furniture, we decided to move a piece at a time. Don’t do it (lesson learned) - it’s a drag. The move has been tiring, but the setting up has been exciting. I re-discovered my old, never-dead passion for home furnishing and organisation and because we started with a blank slate (it is a new build) I have really had a good run of sorting things in the optimal way. I am an absolute maniac of neatness and keeping things containerised so it’s been great fun. I’ve even discovered there are people who do this for a business - part of me wonders if it would be my actual call. I’ve even watched (while doing the sorting) Marie Kondo’s famous show.
We’re not done with everything yet, but most stuff is in place and we’re happy with all the choices made. The process goes on in February.
Because of all this, this month I’ve not had much much time to deal with many other things, something I didn’t like but such is life and I guess sorting a flat from scratch only happens very rarely in life.
Computer Vision
I am working on a project that uses Computer Vision at work, an area I dealt with a lot in the past too but am now consolidating more and more. Everything is very interesting, especially on dataset-building for the ML jobs.
Reading
I’m reading “How democracies die” by S Levitsky and D Ziblatt. It’s pretty good (and bleak). I’m also reading (yup I always read more things at the same time) “Jewish” by M Greene, which is very interesting, a memoir and recollection about the personal and cultural meaning of being Jewish, today. Very educational.
Friends
I’ve had many flat-related conversations with friends, unsurprisingly. There’s some of them I’ve not seen in a while, largely due to the pandemic, so it has been nice to talk.
My “book” & on writing in general
I’ve started writing a book! It is about entering data science and is meant as a collection of pieces of advice for people who are approaching the field, based on my experience and what I’ve learned. In January I wrote my first draft, I’m part of the TechWriters community that has been extremely helpful in giving starting tips and feedback on drafts. Very happy with the start so far, it will be a long haul throughout the year but I did make an effort to start soon and did. The first draft has been also (within January!) been published here.
An idea is lurking into my brain to start a newsletter, I’ve been exploring Substack for that (and I follow a couple of very good ones). I think I will see how this book writing goes first and then potentially start embarking on something that requires cadenced production.
Writing this on the 14th of February and I cannot think of anything else that went into January really. As I said, the flat has taken the lion’s share of my physical and mental energies for the month, so will leave this as is and see you in February!