It truly has been a long time since i posted a diary entry. In fact, my last diary post was at the start of the whole Corona situation. Fortunately noone in my inner circle got hit by the pandemic for now. Although it was stressful for my parents, for they work in the food industry and as many other people working in that industry, couldn’t go to work for a while because of mandatory lockdowns. On the bright side we could and had to lay back for a while and enjoyed some quality family time. Since i went to Japan a year before, I had no financial deposit anymore and moved in with my parents for a while. Here I was also able to additionally support my brother in homeschooling and spending some last teenage sibling time together before he grows into puberty and thinks he is too cool for everything.
I continued my job as a working Student at OSP, where i was employed previously. Mandatory homeoffice was a blessing and my project allowed me to work independently. Our task was to develop a datawarehouse framework with open source tools such as Airflow, Superset and postgresDB which was deployed in oracle cloud. It was a real adventure and i could learn a lot, as well as utilize a lot of my previous knowledge on how to operate and use ETL processes. While at first homeoffice was enjoyable, i felt that working in a room isolated from other humans is not my thing and i started to go to the office in early 2021 again, when the regulations where softened. Even though i did not work directly with other colleagues, in my opinion it still has a nice touch and i do enjoy listening to and just seeing other people. While i was working from home there were days where i literally rolled over from my bed to my chair into the first daily meeting. A clear cut between work and private enviroment did improve my mental health a lot.
While we were in lockdown i picked up an old project of mine. An android application to keep track of your expenses. Looking back, i did hack a lot of things together and although it was spaghetti code miraculously it did work. This time with a little bit more experience and a clear idea of features, I decided to start over from scratch.
Although i started a while ago, i got more and more involved in Volleyball lately. When we were in lockdown i practiced with my brother. When the restrictions softened i practiced in a club, with friends or even with strangers who became friends. The other day i actually had my very first official match. And let me tell you it was like 2 seasons of Haikyuu packed in 1 hour of play time. Although i am playing in probably the lowest hobby league possible, i still felt the preassure of the official match. At first i was really nervous and didn’t hit hard enough. However after a while – just like that – i got used to it. My positioning was on point and receiving felt better than at practice times.
There was even a ball which i swear i actually watched it approach in slow mothion while receiving. Although we still lost in the end, partly because of me evading their blocks one too many times than necessary, it was an amazing experience playing with different people not just for fun but also to really win (or not lose).
Universitywise i finished one of the first hands on machine learning project on the topic of object detection. I actually even published a post of a part of what I’ve learned in that project which surprisiigly gets decent amount of clicks.
In early 2021 i started a research paper about “Use cases of machine learning in incident management regarding production machines”. Although it took me way longer than initially planned i managed to summed up a structured literature review of 63 papers, which in the end was quite fascinating and provided me some more insights into machine learning techniques especially those which focus around time series data.
As a matter of fact, i asked to switch projects and to participate in a ML relatd topic at work. I got assigned to a topic called anomaly detection in streaming data, which does actually has some overlap with my research paper. Here instead of using traditional sequence to sequence techniques i am currently working with a brand new deep learning model – the Transformer. Although it is highly intersting i can not see myself working in the field of Data Science yet, but
maybe that might also stem from my lag of experience.
Hungsblog has come a long way. This blog is running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ next to other services such as Grafana, owncloud, VPN Server, etc. It has endured many obstacles and design changes and runs quiet smooth most of the times. However lately it was regularly prone to errors and crashes. That is why i have been upgrading the Pi 3B+ to a Pi 4 8GB model! Since all services are deployed as container and important files are mounted to an external drive, switching hardware was an easy task – hooray to Docker. Next to way more RAM it seems to be also faster in processing speed and all in all is just delightful to work with. I am truely looking forward to blog more.
