RC: Week 2

This week I kept talking and meeting with people, a combination of scheduled talks and impromptu meetings in the hub and especially the kitchen (especially especially the coffee machine). I found the coffee bot to be a good way of having an opt-in coffee chat with people that you haven't met yet, or to get to know others better that I've already introduced myself to.

I'm continuing to be impressed and happy about the pure breadth and diversity of people in terms of background and talents. It's really great to get to know what people are working on and realizing further fields which you may not even know exist and / or know about but have to real clear picture of. I hope I'll be able to meet everyone in my batch by the end of the retreat.

During this week I started learning about web development, HTML and CSS, in order to build this website and have somewhere to publish my notes. I've started this several times in the past but never gotten to the finishing line, so I see this as a success in itself, a small win for me to get started.

I will not go into the technicalities of this website and how I've decided to structure my notes and pages. For a note on this, see my note on how I build this website!

During this week I had an idea which came to me, where I will build a "this RC does not exist"¹ by taking photos of the hub and then fine-tune an image generative model on this dataset. I already know a lot of machine learning, but generative modelling has never been one of my fields of focus.

I am excited about doing this project as it would allow me to do a full ML-pipeline from data collection all the way to a user facing website serving images. Let us see how this goes. I have already started collecting some images, so it's a start!

There are so much you could potentially do at RC. It's easy to form study groups or hold events around almost any topic of choice. It's a real smorgasbord of opportunity, to dive deep in topics you already know or pick up something new and go from beginner to intermediate in 3 months. Of course, the effect of focusing on too many things is that you will not get too far into any one topic in addition to taking energy and time from actually working on projects.

During this week I realized that I cannot attend everything and that I should be a bit more mindful where I spend my time and energy in order to finish a project before the end of the batch. Some events I want to attend from time to time even though it may not be related to my area of expertise (like the creative coding session where we code something in 90 minutes using a small prompt to work the creative muscles), but others I will have to leave for now as otherwise I will spread myself too thin.