Heyo everyone, so I hope you know me, if not so go and check my profile :D Ok, so I wanted to write a YEAR in REVIEW, just to review my work of 2021. So honestly before writing I didn’t have any idea on how to write a year in review so I checked a few online resources to learn how to write the same. So this blog is going to be full of some experiments, comment if you want to give any suggestions.

These are a few things which I want to highlight -

Review what happend last year

One thing to say, this year a lot of stuff happened (here year == 2021 xD). So I thought why not round them up, round up all the ups and downs, good and bad. I won’t bore you for sure -

Some Yearly higlights -

Technical -

  • Made a new business idea (won’t share it lol: still under construction), got it reviewed and worked on MVP product with bugs and errors :P
  • Started reading a book called Deep Learning using Computer Vision.
  • Completed two academics semester
  • Worked on the startup project Traboda, learned stuff related to web dev, mostly front end (React).
  • Mentored on Android client SDK project under GSoC 2021 for The ASF(The Mifos Initiative)
  • Graduated as GDSC Lead 2020-21
  • Selected as an Android Research Intern in CMU
  • Selected in some summer schools, attended a few like MaLGa Unige
  • Replicated some research papers such as morphological classification, SRGANs, etc
  • Worked with a Professor named Gilad, we worked on th project by CMU - Autolab, related to auto evaluation of assignments, we integrated it in our college and automated most of the stuff based on our use case.
  • Joined Atom EI as an Android Engineer Intern
  • Got interested in Visual Learning and Recognition, Robotic Vision, and ML Securities.
  • Took 2 sessions, one on Android Development and the other on Introduction to AI
  • Won Best Hardware Digikey Category and Best Google Cloud category prize in MLH hackathon

Lifestyle

  • Started investments in stocks, learned some stuff related to Intraday trading, F/O, and market trends (a lot to learn tho)
  • Regular in Gym to stay Fit
  • Started learning German
  • Wrote some blogs
  • Started reading The Atomic Habits
  • Completed reading The Power of Subconscious Mind

Leadership

  • Worked in amFOSS Praveshan 2021 with other batchmates and jrs. Made mistakes but learned a lot, completed the beginning stuff. Also helping other batchmates to manage the club.

Travel

  • Completed two TRIPs (Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh(Upcoming))

Other than this, there were so many ups and downs that came in between like pandemic, hours wasted in procrastination, overthinking, etc. Went through a lot of online readings, meetings, discussions, and other stuff to keep me motivated and busy throughout this year, still it had some ups and downs, lows and highs, learnings and unproductive days, but I believe life is a growing, life is going.

Ok I guess you got bored of this :P

In short,

Lessons learned this year

So this year was a good learning year for me, learned about stuff such as -

  • Startups and other stuff related to business such as what is Saas, business model of a startup, why not to just start things randomly, what is important to focus firs. For example, one should focus first on validating his/her idea with the people around, whether it will be a good idea to start or just other common products existing in the market. Also, there are various others things which one will learn if you are focusing on startups such as how to get fundings, MVP, the tech stack is secondary first is your audience, fund raising, micro startups, etc. There was a good learning curve while exploring all this, you can follow some good Twitter accounts to learn more from their experience and teachings.

  • Basics of Deep Learning, so it was the year where I learned how to get started with this piece of magic. It’s just great to see how things like calculus, linear algebra in general Maths make this whole system much more interesting, it’s like Hogwarts powering Harry’s life with magic. When I started, I focused on learning stuff such as normal DL concepts and libraries like TensorFlow, Keras, PyTroch etc. But soon came to know about the maths part, why one should learn maths to dive deeper. I still remember the chapters I read from Grokking DL explaining the maths behind Neural Networks and other DL theories under the hood. So I believe if you want to make your career in the research oriented part, go and explore maths parallelly. A few books which I would suggest related to Maths are Machine LearningGrokking DL for theory, Deep Learning book by Ian Goodfellow. Other than maths I also came to know the power of quality projects in Deep Learning. If you know the theory, it is not enough you need to learn how to implement them and believe me it is going to help you to understand the concepts from different perspectives which will make it more clear to understand. You can replicate research papers (that’s what I am doing) or maybe start with a quality project, don’t spend time on waste projects :P. So after going through all this I decided to dive deeper into Robotic Vision and Visual recognition domain in AI/DL.

  • Habits vs Goal, ok so I came across this while reading a book The Atomic Habits, it mentioned the term called process, goals, habits, outcomes, beliefs, etc, in one word I loved this book (not completed tho), so this book is about the effects of tiny habits/changes to make some remarkable change in long run. In terms of maths: integrating(calculus) tiny actions over a long time, you will understand the power of changes. It also discusses the system to follow, like what to do and understanding the why part. I would advise everyone to read this book once.

  • Importance of Fitness, ohk this is one of the things I am proud of to start. During this lockdown and pandemic, I was at my home and gained around 15-16 Kgs of weight, and it made me feel quite lazy, unhealthy, inactive so decided to join Gym to focus on health. A lot of things happened in between such as during the second wave, gyms were closed, I got sick for a short period which made me lose all my gained muscle. But still, I maintained the diet, by diet I will say it is one of the healthy diet I ever had, such as boiled beans, sprouts, fresh cheese, all sum it up to make a more protien driven and less carbs diet and on the other hand managing the deficient calorie state. And by managing all this exercise and diet I lost around 17-18 kgs of weight. Finally then decided to restart my muscle gain routine. Soon got to know my college reopening news, so I need to leave my old gym and continue in college gym, it’s going to another headache let’s see how it goes.

  • Importance of a Reading habit, as I mentioned the benefits of reading The Atomic Habits, so similar to that read several other blogs, a few books, and other stuff. I personally believe having consistent reading habits that helps a lot to learn and grow. It will enrich your mind with thoughts that make remarkable changes in the long run. It will help you to think from different perspective. Reading habits not just means reading some lifestyle related books, but it means reading stuff that matters, learning something new, it maybe something like reading a book for learning web dev, or how to cook, how to invest money, or how to learn guitar, it can be anything as far as you’re learning from it.

  • Dealing with Failures - As you might look into some of my achievements but behind all of them there were several failures. I believe getting failed is fine, i remember one of my teacher saying Fail early, fail often, it will help you to learn a lot of things. So failures help you to learn from those mistakes and make a change in your mind (fix mistakes) and then you are ready to grow. Don’t repeat the same mistake which you already did, make some improvements it maybe another different mistake, again follow the same thing and keep on going. Failure is just a redirection, take some time find the path and move on, fight again, learn again that will improve you not sitting idle, standup and fight again. Always belief you’re going to be different from what you were last year, last month, last day, last minute, and last second. If you are improving yourself that’s it you’re growing.

  • Importance of Guidance, it is very important to have guidance, mentors, the teachers in life. They will help you to reshape your thoughts, make more from less. They will correct your mistakes, even they will tell your mistakes which is much more important, rectify them learn from them.

  • Managing teams and mentoring people, not just getting mentorship from others is important, always try to help others, give what you know. It will help others to learn stuff and also make you know where you’re lagging. Help people to learn how to deal with stuff happening around them which you might already faced. Help people to fix things if you already know how to fix or maybe share your expierence with them.

  • Learning communication skills, is really very important, if you know how to talk to people, how to make connections, you are ready to go. I experience the role of communication in exposure. Gave a few talks, took some sessions which helped a lot to learn more stuff related to this. Communication helps in exploring perspective of people on various topics such as education, lifestyle, travel, even on how to communicate.

  • Traveled places to know more about me and people there, it was the best part I learned a lot while traveling, such as culture, tradition, foods, and much more. It helps me to find myself after working for hours and hours, it help me to get back to me and talk for a while and decide what’s going wrong and right. Night stargazing was one of the best parts which I liked and the beauty of places were such an amazing thing I saw ever.

Other than this there are numerous learning happened this year, all thanks to people around me to teach me :D

So now what next, ok firstly, A Very Happy New year in Advance for 2022.
Secondly, I created some plans for next year (here, next year == 2022), don’t know how much I will be able to complete, how much my plans will be efficient in shaping my future but for sure will learn something new, be more regular, be more a team guy, a lot of stuff are there which I am planning now to accomplish in 2022, the upcoming year is going to be much more important to me, so I did some kind of planning and some year review in advance, that I will share it soon in next blog. Thanks for reading till here :D