Merry Christmas friends! 🎅
I am keeping this edition short as, after all, it's Christmas! It’s important to spend time with family and have some rest.
This year has been wild for me.
If you said at the start of 2023 that I would have a newsletter with 750+ subs, genuinely I would have laughed. I know it’s cliche, but it’s true.
So, I thank everyone who reads this every Monday and also the new subs who enjoyed us just this week (hello!).
Writing this newsletter has become like my personal online journal where I waffle my thoughts every weekend. Some people seem to get value out of it, which is all the motivation I need to keep posting indefinitely.
As we head into the new year, I have been doing some reflecting and planning that I will probably share in the next edition. I encourage you to do the same. Enjoy the holiday season, but take some time to review your accomplishments, failures, and everything in between. That way, you will start 2024 on the front foot!
Merry Christmas and I will see you in the new year! 🎉
What’s Been Cooking (This Year) 🥘
Instead of my usual weekly news report, I have linked an article that wraps up this year in Tech nicely. Enjoy!
Yearly Favourites ❤️
Books
📚 Book - The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe. Earlier this year I read Keefe’s recent book about the Sackler family and Oxycontin. This one is just as thrilling and is about the gangs, smuggling and illegal activities inside New York’s Chinatown.
📚 Book - Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. Been reading this book lately and it’s truly eye-opening. Being in the tech industry myself, I understand the power of algorithms, but the techniques implemented by big tech, particularly on social media platforms are scary. As a society, our attention is slowly collapsing. For example, the average office worker in the US can only focus on one task for three minutes. I plan to do a longer post about this book!
📚 Book - Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow. This is THE book for anyone who wants to learn or know more about data science and machine learning. I have been using it as my go-to reference text for the past week.
📚 Book - Atomic Habits by James Clear. Feels like everyone who’s into personal development or productivity has read Atomic Habits and for good reason. I am really enjoying James’ storytelling and ‘clear’ actionable advice on building better habits and allowing the power of compounding. This is probably one of the best ‘self-help’ books out there.
Podcasts
🎙️ Podcast - Lex Fridman: Jeff Bezos. Think the title says it all. A great exploration of physics, rockets, and philosophy.
🎙️ Podcast - Colin and Samir: An Honest Conversation with Ali Abdaal. Ali Abdaal is probably one of the biggest reasons I started my YouTube channel, so I have practically listened to most of his stuff. I always find his podcasts interesting and insightful, and this one is no different.
🎙️ Podcast - What Now? - Sam Altman. Pretty sure this is the first podcast that Sam Altman has done since the whole OpenAI fiasco. He is coy with many details regarding his controversial sacking, but is very forthcoming on his views on AI and where he sees OpenAI heading. An interesting listen.
🎙️ Strike It Big Podcast - The Money Expert: From $0 to Multi-Millionaire Without Trying Hard. Fair to say, Timothy Armoo is a pretty interesting and successful guy, lots of interesting lessons from this one.
Videos & Channels
🎬 YouTube - Fireship. Probably one of the best channels out there for tech. Short, entertaining, and funny videos on coding and the latest AI news.
🎬 YouTube - Brian Ruiz. Brian is a software engineer based in Houston and his content is fire. The aesthetic, vibe and simplicity of his videos are amazing. I hope someday my YouTube videos will be up to the same level!
🎬 YouTube - Alex Hyett. Through browsing the internet, I came across Alex’s blog and subsequent YouTube channel. Alex’s journey from full-time software engineer to content creator is very interesting. Alex provides fantastic advice and knowledge on topics from computer science to entrepreneurship. Highly recommend anyone to check out some of his work!
🎬 YouTube - Why Neural Networks can learn (almost) anything. I have never watched a better description and explanation of neural networks in my life. It captures many of the intricacies and intuition behind neural nets and all in 10 minutes!
🎬 YouTube - Watching Neural Networks Learn. Last week I said I had never watched a better video about neural networks. Well, this one is a close second and by the same creator. Neural networks are just giant universal approximation functions. However, so are the Taylor and Fourier series’, that predate neural networks by at least a couple of hundred years. So, why do we use neural networks? Well, this video answers the question and more! It also fits one to the Mandelbrot set!
Newsletters
🗞️ Newsletter - MLPills. A great newsletter delivering bite-size technical descriptions, especially on time series!
🗞️ Newsletter - The Debug. My colleague Steve has recently launched a newsletter to share his 15+ years of experience as an engineer. What I really like about it, is that it's not solely focused on technical topics, but delves into the often-overlooked 'soft' skills and intangibles that are useful for successful engineers and managers
Articles & Blogs
📝 Blog - Meta-Heuristics Explained: Ant Colony Optimization. This awesome blog is about one of the coolest optimization methods. The ant colony heuristic was inspired by how ants find the shortest route within their farms!
📝 Blog - Khouloud El Alami. Unlike most data or computer science bloggers out there who post technical content (including me 😀), Khouloud writes about her journey as a Junior Data Scientist at Spotify and helpful tips on how to get there and the learning required. I particularly enjoyed her thorough guide on the things you need to learn to be a Data Scientist.
📝 Blog - Legal and Ethical Perspectives on Generative AI. An interesting analysis of the copyright, privacy, and misinformation of GenAI tools.
📝 Blog - NP-What? Complexity Types of Optimization Problems Explained. A great blog post detailing the time complexity of optimisation algorithms, with fantastic visuals.
(PS: Some links are affiliate links that I get a kickback from with no extra cost to you 😎)