My 2024 Self-Reflection and Checkpoint: Where I Am in My Career
As of July 20, 2024
Dear reader, wherever you're reading this from, hope you’re well. How has 2024 been for you? Are you working on something new? Tackling something? Learning a novel tool or a concept? Transitioning into an entirely different field? If you've answered yes to any of these questions, we are quite similar!
I’ve wanted to write this self-reflection for a while for self-accountability. So, this is my rough 2024 checkpoint report that I want to share highlighting what I've done, what I'm doing, and what I want to do this year.
Things I've Done So Far
Created my personal website (the current one you're reading this from!). If you can correctly guess the meaning behind the name, I’ll personally treat you to dinner 😄
Started taking better care of my physical health by going to the gym and walking a lot more.
I love photography, so I arranged a photo gallery site from a template to store photos that capture special moments. My friends may find some of them nostalgic!
Arranged my own resume site from a template because I thought it’d be cool. And I believe it is quite cool!
Started a tech job at Rakuten!
Accepted the challenges of learning multiple programming languages at the same time as a business graduate (it’s tough, man).
Built a habit of learning things of my interest outside work. A full-time job can get quite tiring and all our brains tell us is to go to sleep right after, but that was essentially why I needed to change my mindset towards studying after everyday work. I will write a separate post on this later, but I wanted to say that this has been quite effective for me!
My personal website I mentioned earlier? It hit a monthly traffic of 1000+ unique visitors for the first time last month.
Also started embracing this new challenge of writing on LinkedIn to connect with like-minded people & support people trying to break into tech.
What I'm Currently Doing
Learning JavaScript & TypeScript at work. The only language I was familiar with before April 2024 was Python, so this has been quite the journey so far.
Learning Machine Learning from scratch. This is closely related to the fact that I realized I hadn’t been learning things the right way my whole life until I started learning JavaScript. Therefore, I’ve started learning Machine Learning all over again. For this, I’m currently taking up Math.
Studying the Neural Network - Zero to Hero course series by the renowned Andrej Karpathy. It’s a series with long videos for each course where we understand neural networks by basically building them from scratch. The plan is to write notes on each one and share them here when I’m done. Course link for anyone interested:
Personal branding! My SNS strategist and I are currently building up visual assets and a management system for content for my personal branding: IDOSUMIT. I look forward to sharing my brand’s new visual identity soon!
I’ve also created my notes website to unload notes regarding the aforementioned studies. It is already live, with some incomplete notes here and there.
My Year-End Objectives
Reach an intermediate level of mastery in JavaScript, TypeScript, and React.js (the frontend library for these languages). I have a roadmap specifically lined up for this, and I plan to stop using a website builder & create one on my own with the acquired skills at the end of this year.
Travel around Kyushu! I want to return to Beppu to try the green curry at APU again 😁
Complete the challenging “Neural Network- Zero to Hero” course series.
A difficult one, this, but I also want to build at least 1 large language model (LLM) of my own from scratch by implementing Sebastian Raschka’s “Build a Large Language Model” book!
Make more friends!
That’s it! I’ve ended up writing too much here. If you’ve actually read it this far, thank you so much. I appreciate you a lot.
In any case, I aim to write weekly reports on my progress from here, so you’ll see my posts more regularly from now! Hopefully, you don’t mind!
If you have any questions or things you want to discuss regarding this post or anything, you can always call me for coffee or a discussion! I’m always down :).
See you soon!
Appendix for Links
My personal website
https://idosumit.com/My photo gallery site
https://photo.idosumit.com/My resume site
https://resume.idosumit.com/Andrej Karpathy's Neural Network - Zero to Hero Series
https://github.com/karpathy/nn-zero-to-heroMy notes site
https://notes.idosumit.com/Sebastian Raschka’s “Build a Large Language Model” book