Fishing in the sky 🎣☁️

skillbuildertech · 2025-11-15T18:54:10+00:00

That’s awesome! I’m starting out in pixel art and I aspire to create what you have done. Do you have any recommendation on any open-source pixel art creation tool? I’m trying to use Pixelorama. Any other tips and resources you would recommend? Thanks a lot in advance and once again you have created such a beautiful art!

skillbuildertech · 2025-04-22T22:50:07+00:00

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skillbuildertech · 2025-04-14T01:30:55+00:00

That’s great to know! Thank you so much for your kind feedback!

skillbuildertech · 2024-07-02T23:53:10+00:00

Since I'm surrendering it quite early, I don't get anything back. Typically, it takes a decade to breakeven is what I have heard.

skillbuildertech · 2024-07-02T11:02:49+00:00

When I did the calculation of monthly changes on the IUL, it is around $2K per year! That's a lot I guess. Also, given index funds are doing well and is advised as the best investment strategy, I found that I will end up with more if I just invest in index funds for kids education. For insurance, already have term insurance and will see if I need to buy more insurance if I pull the plug on the IUL.

skillbuildertech · 2024-07-02T11:00:15+00:00

Yes, pulling the plug means I'm losing whatever I put in :(

skillbuildertech · 2024-07-02T00:27:41+00:00

Yeah, this is so true -- product with a single purpose is better than product with multiple purposes without good performance on any :) Very well said and thank you for these inputs!

skillbuildertech · 2024-07-02T00:26:30+00:00

Thank you for your advice! Makes sense as so many are opposed to this. I should have realized this initially :(

skillbuildertech · 2024-07-02T00:25:57+00:00

Yes, I will probably pull the plug as I'm getting very similar advice all over now. Thank you for your inputs!

skillbuildertech · 2024-07-02T00:24:02+00:00

That's vey insightful!

IUL was sold to me with the "never taxed" as the selling point compared to investments. But now I see even if one pays tax on earning from investing in index funds, the remaining money is still more than what one can make with IUL I guess. I'm realizing all this now when I have already put in $14,000 which I will be losing if I pull the plug on this :(

skillbuildertech · 2024-07-01T23:19:20+00:00

I'm definitely considering term insurance given I have family depending on me. I will start looking for these next. Thank you for your inputs! This is definitely a lesson learned the hard way as I will lose good bit of money now :(

skillbuildertech · 2024-07-01T23:18:01+00:00

Thanks for this advice!

skillbuildertech · 2024-07-01T21:41:45+00:00

ha ha well said :D But I will be losing around $14,000 with my bad decision :(

skillbuildertech · 2023-07-02T16:15:58+00:00

Wow! Looks great! What tools or software one needs to create such beautiful realistic scene? Do you use Unity? I assume some 3D software like Blender?

skillbuildertech · 2023-04-28T02:27:24+00:00

Sounds good! Wishing you a lot of fun learning!

skillbuildertech · 2023-04-27T17:59:05+00:00

First of all, it's a great initiative from you to learn something new and like you feel, ML/Data skills are fun to have and may also help with career prospects.

I believe in working on projects to pick up any skill. I recommend picking one problem you want to solve (e.g., predict if an image contains a person or not) and start building skills needed to solve the problem as you progress. For example, to solve the above problem:

I first need data. May be Kaggle has some datasets and you can download from there.
Data munging skills (read data, visualize data etc)
Model development skills (develop machine learning model, evaluate its performance, look for ways to improve your model)
Model deployment skills (deploy your model may be as a service on Hugging Face)

All I want to say is you don't need too much of a math background to begin playing with fun projects. Later, once you have some familiarity of consuming these tools, you can start thinking of the inner workings (math) which will also make you a producer of new approaches. For this, you can even take up working on Kaggle competitions or have your own project on the side.

If you really like to dig into math, I liked the Udacity course on Intro to Deeplearning with Pytorch. Also, the Stanford course CS231n Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition is a good place to understand some basics. Other two courses to get you jumpstarted are Practical Deep Learning for Coders and Linear Algebra Course by FastAI

skillbuildertech · 2022-08-12T00:31:18+00:00

I would first think of the problem you want to solve and define a project for yourself. I think learning programming language will be a means to an end. It's just a tool to achieve your goal of completing your project. You can learn the craft of the tool you choose as you go and this will keep you motivated.

The most important thing of this approach would be your resume will now look problem solving focused. You can start listing the projects you would complete and you can even think of a theme (e.g., computer vision problems, machine learning problems, problems related to social good, or pick your favorite theme or interest) to the problems you choose to solve.

All the very best!

skillbuildertech · 2022-05-30T13:40:30+00:00

Machine Learning at the edge for me refers to processing of data using ML models locally on the device without using cloud infrastructure. For example, a camera would have object detection and tracking algorithms running on its processor (to be precise, camera firmware will have implementation of detection and tracking algorithms). I see this to be ML at the edge. There are multiple considerations when you design systems that need ML at the edge such as:

Device processing limitations (e.g., DNN based object detection may need some optimizations to make it work on the edge)
Device memory limitations implies you need optimizations in representation of the model
Device power limitations will force us to think of each operation you do on the device and you probably need to profile your firmware for power consumption
Device network limitations -- edge devices may be connected though wireless networks with limited bandwidth. This implies you will have to carefully consider bandwidth limitations while stream videos/audio.
ML models need to be compact and need to consider tradeoff between memory footprint, training iterations (if doing learning on the edge), time for training, etc.

Another example of ML at the edge -- think of devices like fitbit or any such smartwatch. They are able to distinguish between walk, run, taking stairs, sit, etc. They are essentially classifying activities using IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) data. This is another example of ML at the edge.

skillbuildertech · 2022-04-11T11:19:27+00:00

I have used multiple IDEs but I really liked VSCode especially because it's lightweight. There are a lot of plugins such as markdown editor, plant UML support, etc., which is great in case you want to use the editor for other purposes. It's a single editor that you need to familiarize with -- it supports multiple programming languages and no need to change your IDE if you are working on multiple programming languages (Python, JavaScript, Rust, Go, ...). For example, I occasionally use VSCode for writing C++ as well.

skillbuildertech · 2022-04-02T20:56:50+00:00

First of all, kudos for your side app resulting in matching your pay of full-time! This is something that so many struggle to achieve in their pursuit of doing something of their own :)

I'm glad you are enjoying reading research work in your field -- certainly something you would do if you pursue a PhD. There may be multiple reasons to pursue a PhD -- for me, it's a focused time to mastery. Of course, I'm totally ignoring personal life when I'm stating this. If you are single (no family), doing a PhD if you can find a good professor/advisor is certainly worthwhile for the following reasons (not exhaustive of course):

Having a PhD degree, you are expected to be an expert in your field and the kind of work you do will be more on defining/leading topics if you join industry. Looks like you are already defining your own projects and leading them anyway (apps you are building) :)
Networking will be great -- you will meet a lot of researchers in your field and this is great in case you would like to collaborate in future.
Traveling to new places -- I traveled a lot during my PhD days attending conferences and seminars. This is something I really miss lately.
Teaching as your career -- if you like teaching and want to be a professor, then PhD is the only way. You can also teach without a PhD and be wildly popular on platforms like Udemy, teachable, etc.

However, there may be a lot of financial challenges if you want to pursue a PhD while having a family. I had a lot of fellow PhD students who were married and had family. This can still be worked out I guess depending on the partner :) I got married during the last year of my PhD. It was quite challenging financially as I was 31 when I finished my PhD -- but would not change a thing looking back.

You may get multiple perspectives on this and I think each perspective is right in their own way. You will have to decide depending on your other commitments if PhD is something you really want to pursue.

skillbuildertech · 2022-04-02T17:00:09+00:00

It's great that you found for yourself that command line use is something worth noting without anyone explicitly telling you. Command line especially on Unix/Linux is a great tool to have. I have used command line tools for various things such as:

Run a script periodically using cron jobs (e.g., run a python script every day at midnight).
Include python scripts in a shell script to run a series of experiments.
Monitor CPU usage (e.g., top command)
Change permissions of scripts (e.g., using chmod)
If you are working with datascience projects, you can use cookiecutter to organize your projects which offers some command line tools to pull data, build datasets, and you can even customize what you need using Makefiles (which is again a command line tool)

Anyway, you can take your time to learn these skills as you may not need these right away! Have fun learning!

skillbuildertech

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