Week 27

I'm not really a neat person, so I need some kind of system to keep my notes organized. I tried different systems in the past, from Zettelkasten to BASB, but in the end, no complex system worked for me.

This week, I set up a minimal workflow to help me collect and digest the information I need.

As an old-time Emacs user, I'm using Org-mode, Orgzly Revived, and Wallabag to keep track of the stuff I came across online. I'm going to dig into this workflow in a separate blog post.

I've used Python when I was a freelancer (mostly Django projects), but when I had the chance to start my business, I chose Clojure as the main language (another possible blog post about why).

Unfortunately, some very useful Python libraries are yet to be fully matched by a Clojure counterpart, especially in the data science field. Years ago, I took a "Machine Learning" course by Andrew Ng on Coursera, and the whole course was based on Octave. Early this year I started the same course, and now it's fully on Python and Jupyter notebooks.

So I'm working to brush up on my Python knowledge. My goal is to create some ML/AI proofs of concept with it, and then refine or integrate them with Clojure.

Last year, I took over a dye formulation and quality control software for the textile industry from another developer. This involves quite some math and patience, since the source code is Python and Vue.js. Anyway it's fun to play with spectrophotometers.

In my "free time", I'm working on a project (Clojure, this time) for extracting structured data from digital documents (PDF/docx/images), such as technical sheets or certificates of analysis.

There were some not-so-good moments in the past week: I had a couple of anxiety hiccups: I dealt with them quite well, but still a PITA. My mood swings from "I can do it" to "I'm a fraud". I'm lucky to have my partner's support, encouraging me to go out and try not to think too much about work. Also, my two dogs cheer me up when I am in a bad mood.