2022: My Year in Review

So much has happened this past year. Through it all I didn’t get a chance to post a review of 2021. Nonetheless, here’s my roundup for the past year.

Moving to California

In the fall of 2021, I quit my Ph.D. and accepted an offer to work at Apple as a Data Scientist. I started working full-time remotely in Texas and made plans to relocate to California in January. Moving was very stressful as I had to pack and ship several boxes to a temporary residence in California. I also had to complete a cross-country road trip from Houston to the Bay Area.

I was nervous about the road trip but I enjoyed the experience. I drove through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. There weren’t many interesting sites to see until I arrived in California. If I had the option I would have driven through Colorado and Utah as those states are more scenic. Unfortunately, I was only going to receive compensation for taking the most efficient route rather than the most scenic one.

After I arrived in California, I moved into a temporary residence. Shortly after, I had to look for an apartment to move into long-term. During about two weeks I toured several apartment complexes on weekends before I finally signed a lease. Getting furniture was difficult due to supply chain issues. It took at least a month to get a mattress and a bed frame!

Nonetheless, I have enjoyed living in the Bay Area. It’s never been hard for me to find new places to explore and there’s still so much to see.

Switch to the Fujifilm Camera System

I started my hobby in photography with the Nikon D3300 camera. After working with this camera for two years, I decided to buy a Fujifilm XT4 and a few lenses. I considered getting a Sony full-frame camera. But given that the lenses for Sony cameras tend to be very expensive and that I wasn’t going to make use of the advantages of a full-frame sensor I opted to get another APSC camera.

I enjoy the tactile feel of the Fujifilm XT4. Unlike my previous camera, it’s much easier to change various settings like ISO, shutter speed, and aperture with the physical dials. Given that this is a mirrorless camera I like the added convenience of seeing the exposure of images directly in the electronic viewfinder as I frame a shot.

There’s still so much to learn about how to use my Fujifilm camera to its full potential. I’ve found pal2tech’s YouTube channel to be very helpful for learning the ins and outs of the Fujifilm ecosystem.

For instance, I recently discovered that you can create film simulation recipes. I was also unaware of Fujifilm X Raw Studio, a free software tool, that allows you to process images using your custom-created film simulations. I may use this in some situations to get around manually post-process images in Capture One and Photoshop.

Travels

I went on several trips this year to various places. (I’ll add pictures to this post later)

• Crater Lake
• Big Sur
• Lassen National Park
• Sequoia National Park
• Lake Tahoe
• Copenhagen
• Paris
• Rome
• Yosemite National Park

Learning Spanish

In 2021, I put a lot of effort into learning French after quitting my Ph.D. This involved finding pen pals to practice speaking and writing in French. These efforts began to subside after I moved to California as I got very busy with getting settled into my new residence and adapting to the demands of my new job.

My interest in continuing to learn French waned after realizing that French isn’t the easiest language to maintain in the US. It’s not very often that I come across French speakers where I live. My partner speaks Spanish so I’ve opted to learn Spanish in the coming year.

Learning Spanish so far has been challenging. I realized I’ve forgotten how difficult it can be to learn and memorize verb conjugations. It has made me appreciate my knowledge of French as I’ve gotten to a stage where I don’t have to think much about conjugations.

In the meantime, I’m maintaining my knowledge of French by listening to podcasts and occassionally reading books and articles in French.

Reading

Each year I strive to read at least 12 books. This time I managed to read 6 books which include:

• Le Manuel d’Epictete by Epictetus - The French translation of the Manual of Epictetus.
• Breakfast with Seneca by David Fiedler - Goes into some of the themes of Stoic philosophy as described by Seneca
• Dune by Frank Herbert - A sci-fi classic. I greatly enjoyed the world-building.
• Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender - I read this book to get another perspective on Steve Jobs’s life.
• After Steve by Tripp Mickle - After reading Becoming Steve Jobs I became curious about how Apple has changed since he passed away.
• The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo - This book helped me better understand the role and duties of a manager.

Thoughts on my Career Trajectory

Pivoting Away from Deep Learning

In my previous review for 2020, I stated my desire to become an expert in machine learning. I have since then changed my mind. After experimenting with deep learning in my graduate studies I no longer found the subject very engaging. My experiences taught me that deep learning models still function as black boxes. It can be hard to figure out why they do and do not work. I’ve found this to be very unsatisfying.

In addition, training models for me felt very repetitive. I would tweak a small set of parameters, wait for the model to train, and then examine a set of metrics to determine if this new change of parameters made any difference. After talking to a few professional practitioners about their own experiences I learned that these experiences of mine weren’t uncommon.

I had fun learning about some of the mathematics underlying the backpropagation algorithm and other aspects of neural networks. But this was not enough to sustain my interest in the field.

Notably, this past year has been a breakthrough for machine learning given the success of generative models such as Stable Diffusion and Chat GPT. Because so much money and resources are needed to train such models from scratch, I envision it would be better to learn how to use these tools rather than learn how to build them in the future.

Interest in Software Engineering

I’ve identified that I would like to improve my software development skills. I love learning to build things with code. I also enjoy solving small logic puzzles on my way to completing a project. I’m aiming to learn how to write better maintainable code, and collaborate with other developers on large, complex projects. I also want to learn about algorithms and system design.

Goals for 2023

Here are some of my goals for the coming year:

• Reach B2 level in Spanish
• Complete Chelsea London’s 52-week photography challenge
• Write 12 blog posts
• Read 12 books
• Finish an algorithms course
• Learn more about systems design
• Read these books on software development
  • A Philosophy of Software Design
  • Pragmatic Programmer
  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications