I took a career break in the middle of last year to pursue some of my other interests - both technical and non-technical.
In the process I ended up tinkering with quite a few new things in tech, and I’ve made some of them part of my ongoing and future work.
- I explored the Fast AI API using Jeremy Howards’s fantastic set of videos. I completed most of Part 1 in his Practical Deep Learning course. I learnt some of the Fast.ai API, a little bit of deep learning concepts, and how to use Jupyter notebooks on Kaggle.
- I wrote a Twitter bot that tweets classical music trivia. This was just for fun.
It’s built with Python, Google Cloud Functions, and Firebase. The thing does not cost me a single penny as it runs entirely on GCP’s free tier. I learnt about Twitter bot types and its auth API and a bit of Firebase. - While working on a frontend for a personal project, I had to try out Hotwire. A friend had mentioned this. I did a few tutorials which used ROR. My ROR knowledge is essentially zero, but Hotwire is not tied to ROR - it can be used with any backend.
- For the same project I had to use Java Template Engine. It’s a good thing that it comes with Spring Boot integration.
- Spring boot persistence with JPA/Hibernate - This was for a personal project that I’m still working on. JPA is a beast, and I’m thinking of switching to something simpler, if it exists.
- Rust. This is a whole new way of thinking. It is also a lot of struggling with the compiler for the first few months.