Well, congratulations! If you are reading this, you have experienced and managed to survive the worst pandemic faced by mankind in the last 100 years!
Given all things that happened in 2020, first I was more inclined towards not keeping any record of it - just let it somehow disappear from our timeline. You should already have an idea what I felt about 2020. Then, the idea of a new year motivated me enough to look back at it and plan for the upcoming year - 2021.
Without any doubt, 2020 was truly a lousy year. More than 2 million people died because of the coronavirus. Many more millions lost their jobs, their homes, their security. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses closed permanently because they couldn’t survive without revenue. The damage to our society and our economy has yet to be fully calculated. The damage to our lives has been incalculable. However, these were not the worst things that happened. In my view, the worse was how several leaders world-wide politicized the whole event, even wearing of masks - overall, science lost. We got a taste of how people like Galeleo would have felt when science was challenged by some fringe elements.
Nevertheless, after every dark hour, there is hope of sunshine. I hope we as a society have learnt enough from these events that should make our future more bright. Here is hoping for more value to science, logic and humanity.
On the personal front, 2020 forced me to work from home since March 2020 - I am sure most of you who are reading this must be in a similar state. Surprisingly, this was quite productive year at work. Although, there were times, quite frankly for the first time in my professional life, when was completely drained. There was no point in even taking a break. I have not met a single friend in person in last 10 months! 😥 So, my blogging also got affected. I am hoping 2021 is going to be much better at this front. Fortunately, 2020 still was a good year for learning new things. Following is a brief summary of my 2020:
Top 5 things that I learnt this year:
- Cooking: I ended up cooking a few things - Samosas, Balushahi, Thai curries, Pakodos, Gulab Jamun to name a few.
- Gardening: We tried to grow a lot of things including spinach, green chillies, coriander, onions, garlic, summer flowers, sponge guard etc. - all in portable clothing pots!
- Object detection codebase from scratch in pytorch
- Fish and Zsh shells
- self-supervised learning models. Our paper will be presented at SPIE Medical Imaging 2021!!
Top 5 things I developed this year:
- This blog using 11ty and Tailwind CSS.
- A digital garden of all things I know!!!
- Database engine for managing mammogram data
- Codebase for training and managing ensemble models
- A detector for butterflies
My Incomplete Tasks and Failures:
- VSCode Extension Development
- Diving deeper into CSS
- Reading books
- Blog posts about some of new deep learning algorithms and their implementations
2021: New year, New PromisesSection titled 2021: New year, New Promises
With the beginning of a new year, I want to make few new promises to myself. In no particular order, following are list of things I want to do/learn/complete in this year.
Things to do for this Blog:
- Write about major Research Papers I read
- Write Reviews of Books I have read
- Release the 11ty theme of this blog and write details about its development
- Write more about some of new deep learning algorithms and their implementations
- Write about new recipes that I have learnt to cook
- Write about my gardening experience
Things to Learn and Develop:
- Complete the digital garden page at wiki.reckoning.dev
- VSCode Extension Development
- Contributing to Pytorch Code base
- Get involved with the Detectron 2 codebase for Object detection
- Advanced CUDA Programming
- Publish more papers
- Learn and write more about CSS
Personal Health Goals
- Do Yoga at least 5 hours a Week
- More Hiking
- Visit at least 20 new Beaches
All in all, 2020 was an interesting experience, and I still managed to learn a few things! I’m super excited for 2021. Thank you all for reading, contributing, discussing and following my content here. I hope to be a lot more productive here in 2021. Please do follow me on Twitter
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