Recently I had my second visit to the ER. It was a lot longer than the first one and a bit more unpleasant, even though the hospital building and the treatment processes appear to have been improved since then. While I waiting there for five hours, with brief breaks to
Last week I was on vacation in Spain. I was there for only a week, but that was enough for the barista at the closest coffee shop to remember how I like my coffee: "Oat milk, right? And sorry, we don't have sugar"[1]. I had
programming
One of the things that has sparked a lot of joy in my life in the last two years was building an app to keep track of "podcasts" I want to listen to. I'm using podcast in a very loose sense here, it's more
blog
I've been blogging for 14 years now. I started off writing in Romanian, while I was in highschool. I credit writing all those posts with helping me get a really good grade at my Romanian exam at the end of high school. Then in university, I wrote a
windows
When developing FastAPI based web services, I sometimes run into a weird issue on Windows: I kill the uvicorn process, but the port it used remains in use and I get responses in the browser, even though the server appears to not be running. Today I learned what's
git
Until today, I always used Github as a server, pushing my code changes there, then pulling from there to the deployment server (in a more or less automated fashion). But today I ran into a locked down VM that blocked Github, so I had to find alternative ways to get
git
As a freelancer, I work for many clients, who have their source code in many different places, often self hosted. I generally create new SSH keys for each separate platform. Unfortunately, Git doesn't provide an option for what keys to use, you have to configure this in the
programming
I work on many different projects and I use some ActivityWatch for automatic time tracking. AW has a feature where you can use regexes to match window titles to assign them automatically to different projects. But, unfortunately, Jupyter Notebook have a "{filename} - Jupyter Notebook" title in the
programming
I often need to set up a VM with a server to run some ML models. While I could package things in Docker and deploy them like that, whenever possible, I like to do things more directly, using systemd services. To create a systemd service, create a file called /etc/
Thoughts of a machine learning consultant
When running long running code in Jupyter, I want to get notified when it finished so that I can get back to it. There is an extension to do that with browser notifications, but there are times when I leave the computer while waiting for an ML training to finish.
I use tmux as a multiplexer and for running some long-running commands on servers. Today I encountered a weird issue: when trying to attach to an existing tmux session (or when trying to do anything with tmux), I would get the following error: can't create socket: Permission denied
Yesterday my friend Marius Corici called me and asked me if I wanted to be interviewed (again) by ProTV, this time about deep fakes. This time it was a Zoom interview, and they asked me not to blur my background (ugh). And I had my second 15 seconds of fame
As I work from home 90% of the time, I run into a small issue during meetings: I sometimes speak too loudly. Before my daughter Gloria arrived, this was something that annoyed my wife and others in the house, but now, when Gloria is sleeping, this is not just an
My next project where I learn in public is about doing transcripts with Whisper. Whisper is a quite good automatic speech recognition model that is open source and can run on your own computers, provided you have a GPU. I prefer reading to listening, so I wanted to transcribe my
The last couple of months have been quite busy for me. Consultant life is starting to pick up the pace (at least some aspects of it), especially the traveling part. It started in March: Make IT in Oradea, a startup incubator where I'm involved as a mentor, had
My two brothers in law are fans of horse riding and last week they invited the rest of the family to join them for a day of horse riding. They encouraged us with fun tales of how of them fell off/was thrown off a horse. Having not done anything
While I am a professional software developer (or machine learning consultant, to be more exact) and I have started learning programming more than 10 years ago, I went to college to study it, I spend a lot of my free time learning more about this domain (because I love it)
After 8 years, I finally went again to a Code Retreat, but this time as a facilitator, not as a participant. As far as I know, it was the first time it was done in Oradea, so kudos to the Oradea Tech Hub team for organizing it. My co-facilitator was
During the last 1 year I've had a lot of changes in my life. I became an independent machine learning consultant. Other people consider me an entrepreneur. I'm still in disbelief about that label, but it's becoming true, especially since I launched my first
Dan Luu and Jamie Brandon have argued quite successfully that increasing your productivity and velocity as a developer can lead to good return on investment. So I've been thinking about doing the same and I was inspired by Michael Lynch to record myself while coding and then to
I've written many times about various goals and plans I've had over the last couple of years. I blogged publicly about it because I had heard that precommitment helps with realizing goals. But, considering that many of the goals on those lists didn't get
