RC: Week 4

This week was a bit all over the place. I felt like I got some things done, but on the other hand I also felt like I lacked some focus with respect to the project. Often I feel that I overestimate what I can get done in a day; I see this in my daily checkins as I often have several points in my todo list for that day which are not ticked off due to unforeseen issues, social meetings or events. At the very least I usually tick some off which is still a win, but it makes me wonder if I should just internalize this and make my estimations more accurate.

I also wonder if I'm maybe being too hard on myself. Yes, there are some things which if I worked harder would have completed, but also I did other things (such as the above social meetings and events) which also feel important. Finding the balance between things is just inherently hard I believe!

Slowly this project is ramping up and this week was interesting as I got to learn some new data science tools I haven't worked with before. The dataset I have collected comes without labels as I collected it myself, so I thought I should also label it for whatever downstream task I decide to use it for. I settled on the Label Studio python library which seems very powerful and lets you define your own annotation UI through XML (I've been learning HTML / CSS for this website, so using XML was not as much of a pain as I thought it would be).

The dataset now consists of about 350 images from around the hub, many of them images of signs or text which I will try to fit a generative image model to. Here are some example images

I've been following the MIT 6.006 course as I never had a proper introduction to algorithms before, which I felt has been holding me back when programming as I did not have a good grasp of more fundamental algorithms (sorting, shortest path, etc.) and data structures (arrays, dictionaries, sets, etc.). I'm really enjoying myself so far, a bit more than halfway through the course.

In addition to the above I've been slowly doing LeetCode problems together with some other RC attendants and it's been great fun. Hope to get some more problems under my belt and tackle medium and hard in due time!