One of my favourite [Fosstodon](https://fosstodon.org) people [Doug Belshaw](https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/) publishes a blog post every week about what he got up to during the week which is always interesting to read. Re-visiting your notes on a weekly basis is always a great idea from both a learning standpoint since it helps you cement the things you learned and wrote about in your mind and also from an appreciation and gratitude standpoint since it makes you take stock and look back at the things you did this week, the volume of which may surprise you. Doing this on your public facing blog has the side effect of making you write in a focused way as if someone other than yourself might read it and that will help you make sense of your own writing when you come back to review it in the future. It can help hold you accountable since its much easier to convince yourself not to bother writing a weeknote or to put it off if you are the only one who will ever see it. Finally of course, there's the possibility that others might read it and find it interesting or learn something.
So I'm giving it a try, I don't know how well it will go or whether I'll manage it every week but I normally find myself at a loose end on a sunday afternoon/evening and so it seems like a perfect time slot to schedule in this new habit.
## This Week
On Monday i finally published my blog about [explainable NLP models with ELI5 and LIME](/2022/03/14/painless-explainability-for-text-models-with-eli5/) which I've been tinkering with since mid January. Explainability is a key challenge for our industry and I get asked about it by our customers a lot. ELI5 makes it easy to provide some explanations for deep learning NLP models but it's still quite hard to explain to people what it really explains and the limitations of the explanations.
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A friend and I have been running our own dedicated server with [soyoustart](soyoustart.com/) for coming up to a decade now and this week we took the plunge and migrated to a newer more powerful machine for the same price (we were running on one of their grandfathered plans). I spent a fair bit of this week migrating many of my web applications from the old machine to the new one over rsync. Thankfully it's been pretty painless and thank goodness for [caddy](/2022/01/08/replacing-nginx-with-caddy/) which has made re-configuring my apps pretty hassle free. The most irritating bit was changing the DNS records for some of my domains and waiting for my ISP's caches to expire. However, I got around this by hard coding the domains and ip address of my new server into my `/etc/hosts` file on my workstation.
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I've been focusing on node.js and typescript backend development [at work](https://filament.ai/) for the last few weeks which has been a nice change from my usual work doing machine learning engineering and MLOps. We're building out a web application for one of our clients which will help them with one of their business processes and integrate with their existing CRM system as well as our [company insights platform](https://syfter.ai). I really enjoy writing typescript but I've been struggling to get it to play nicely with [Bookshelf.js](bookshelfjs.org/) which is an ORM system that has 'dodgy' type support and has ended up sneaking into the project thanks to some legacy requirements. This has meant that I don't get to feel the benefit from a lot of the nice things that typescript brings.
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Now that the weather in the UK is starting to get a bit more pallatable (Except on wednesday when we had sand from the sahara blown across and everything was orange), my wife and I are trying to sort out our garden ready for the summer. Over the weekend we did some much needed maintainence tasks and measured up the big empty bed at the back of our garden which we plan to install raised beds into and grow vegetables in. I need to get a move on and plant the vegetables that we're planning on growing very soon.
{{<figuresrc="images/garden.jpg"caption="The garden is starting to look less of a mess. The table is messy since it got covered in sand from the saharan sand storm">}}
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I've been reading and thinking a lot about my personal knowledge management workflows. Some information [is useful to have on hand for reference purposes](/2022/2/13/running-a-house-knowledge-management/) but I'm also guilty of [being a bit of a collector of information](https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/) without really ever going back and revisiting. I sat and read [Digital Zettelkasten](https://bookwyrm.social/book/273095) in a single sitting early in the week and I'm really interested in adjusting my research workflow into something more akin to the Zettelkasten approach to make writing content and papers easier. I noticed that the Zettelkasten is typically recommended for "students and non-fiction writers" but not necessarily for software/ML engineers/techies. I'm interested to experiment with this technique to help with my engineering skills too. Hopefully I'll have something positive to report back in a future post.
For personal knowledge management geeks, this week was also [Tiago Forte's](https://fortelabs.co/) Second Brain Summit. I didn't manage to make any of the sessions due to time-zone issues but all of the recordings are now [on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVNXAaej57W61wW9vtPNYPIuDnVQLP5TH) and I intend to try and make my way through most of them.
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On Saturday we had a date night and watched [The Adam Project](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2463208/) which is a straight to stream (I guess the new straight-to-vhs?) sci-fi movie and which we both quite enjoyed. This week we also finished [This is Going to Hurt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4h8xbc0cPg), a drama (it has funny moments but I'd say not a comedy-drama because its more dramatic than funny) about a doctor in the NHS about 10 years ago. It has a pretty shocking ending and from what I can tell, is a fairly realistic and damning indictment of the funding situation in the NHS and also a celebration of the frankly heroic staff who keep it ticking over. We also finished [The Marvellous Mrs Maisel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOmwkTrW4OQ), a comedy-drama (truly this time) about a female standup in New York in the 1950s.
I'm continuing to make incremental progress on my scientific paper - probably the last one I'll write before I write up my thesis. Scientific writing is slow progress - it can sometimes take me hours to write a single paragraph. Maybe my Zettelkasten workflow adaptations will help make this a little easier in the future.
I'm working my usual 4 days for [Filament](https://filament.ai), 1 day on my PhD and I'll probably be in the southampton development office for a couple of days. My very talented ML team lead is on a well deserved holiday for the next two weeks so I'll be covering some of her projects and providing support for the rest of the team as well as continuing work on the Typescript project. It's Mother's Day in the UK next Sunday so next weekend we'll be taking my wife's mum out for dinner on saturday and then driving up to meet my mum for lunch on the Sunday.
