Today I want to explain a little about where I am currently.
Yesterday, I mentioned how I had dropped the ball and let myself go. This is definitely the case, however on the flipside, I have certainly learned a lot.
As you can probably tell from the first few sentences of this post, my gift of storytelling was left in preschool, but I’ll try my best here on out. So I have said this post is about where I am today, then talked about yesterday, now I am about to skip backwards even further. I promise it will lead up to today…
A good few months ago, I decided I needed to find a new hobby or area of focus to keep my brain occupied. See I am the kind of person who needs to keep my brain active constantly otherwise I get extremely bored, and then boredom turns into being annoyed at myself for being bored. I’m also figgety and flip between things probably far too much… something I definitely need to work on.
In my attempt to find a new hobby, I casually (not so casually) stumbled across cryptocurrencies. Now, I know what you are thinking … “Oh, he’s one of them who only became interested because of the hype, and wanted to make a quick buck”. In fact, if you are thinking this, you couldn’t be any farther from the truth.
My interest in cryptocurrencies started with the idea of this system where you could transfer some value to another person, anywhere in the world, and the transaction be stored in an immutable ledger. I started to look into this a bit further and more specifically, researching the math and underlying technology. I watched tonnes of videos, and read even more articles in order to develop my understanding. Through this, I also developed a basic understanding of technical trading indicators and their mathematical theories.
It was about this time I found a single video about machine learning (I think I was researching Monte Carlo simulation at the time). I was hooked. I needed to know as much as I could handle. After some research, I found myself signing up to an online course about machine learning. The course focuses extremely heavily on the underlying math of machine learning, and the last time I did this amount of complex math, was never. Last time I did any math in academia was in school, about 13–14 years ago!
After a few weeks of this machine learning course, I was faced with some math I was simply not understanding. No matter how much I tried, I could not understand. Now, most normal people would probably go backwards, go over previous material, and try to solidify their understanding. Not me, instead I decided to jump forward, and tackle significantly more complex theories and functions.
If you take learning a skill as being split up into different stages spread out the length of the alphabet, with beginner knowing nothing at A and expert at Z, I was probably at about C or D when I was stuck, and I decided to jump to around K/L. Probably a bad idea, but I do not regret it. My brain was on fire with new learning material! Once I got a good understanding of these complex theories, I was able to switch back to what I was previously stuck on, and just breeze through with a good understanding.
Currently I am still taking the online course, and have a few others lined up. This year, I want to bring my coding skills up to scratch, and be comfortable with HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, SQL and some other frameworks and data structures. These posts are me keeping myself accountable for my learning!
Right, so this is it for today’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!
Nick
http://www.nickwarters.com
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