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11 Jul 2018

The Latest

The frequency of my blog posts is decreasing not increasing. The past month and a half has really flown by. However, there’s no time for excuses. I just need to start fresh and make it a point to update more often from now until the end of the year. One thing that should help in that regard is refocusing on the Flint deep learning project with my brother. More on that later, though. In the meantime, I can talk about what I have been doing lately.

The new job has been energizing. It wasn’t long ago when that thought never would have entered my mind. However, I’ve really enjoyed the new challenge (I knew I would), and the chance to work on different types of projects. Last time, I think I mentioned how I was wondering when things would pick up. Well, I now know the answer to that. After about 7-8 weeks of reading and working through training modules, I raised my hand and declared myself “ready.” Without a second’s hesitation, I got what I asked for and the work started piling up. At times it is a little overwhelming, but ultimately, there’s satisfaction in feeling like I’m actually contributing to the team. A lot of the frustration will iron itself out as I learn the workflows and the overall sequencing of the projects in this department.

Frequency Fun

What I have learned over the past year or so is that I have a few hobbies. It takes some epic time management to make time around work and family duties for these hobbies. One of those hobbies is making electronic music. As part of my time management plan, Thursday evening is music making night. Sometimes that spills over into Friday evening, or weekends when it won’t disturb family time (or the little guy’s nap!). Even with limited time, I’ve managed to get a few little projects done. One project that has been really fun and rewarding is making some background music for some YouTube videos that my brother is producing. I really love collaborating with my brother, especially on creative projects. Even though we don’t get a chance to visit each other often, this is one way to help keep the communication open and have fun at the same time. So, make sure you follow the link above and check out his channel. It’s early days, but I think the ideas are there, and I’m glad to be a part of it.

Flint Project Update

Another project that allows me to collaborate with my brother is this Flint deep learning project. Unfortunately, I haven’t made much progress, but I plan to refocus in the next few weeks, and I think I can make some major strides. That confidence comes from discovering an established framework for semantic segmentation of satellite imagery. It’s called Robosat, and at first glance it looks like it can tackle exactly what I want to deliver in the first generation of this project. The challenge right now is to get familiar with how it works. Apart from a few blog posts and the github documentation, there aren’t many examples available yet. However, the team behind it seem really enthusiastic and could be a resource for any questions I may have. My aim is to report some results in two weeks with another blog post.

Sneak Peek

As a reward to anyone who made it this far, here’s a peek at a recent tune I made for one of my brother’s YouTube videos.