Roland Szabo

Christian. Husband. Programmer. Nerd.

programming

Making a loudness monitor for online meetings

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

learning

Learning in public: Transcribing podcasts with Whisper

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

travel

Where's rolisz?

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 its first

hiking

Roland tries new things: Horse riding

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

programming

On the usefulness of a little bit of programming

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)

gdcr

Facilitating Code Retreat in Oradea

After 8 years [https://rolisz.ro/2014/11/17/global-day-of-code-retreat-2014/], 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

personal

To changes

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 side-project [https://certcons.ro/] (or is

learning

Learning in Public: Exploring the BT iPay API

Dan Luu [https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/] and Jamie Brandon [https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/moving-faster/] 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 [https:

personal

The right time for every habit

I've written many [https://rolisz.ro/2011/06/29/planuri-de-vacanta/] times [https://rolisz.ro/2016/01/01/setting-goals/] about various goals [https://rolisz.ro/2017/01/07/new-year-old-goals/] and plans [https://rolisz.ro/2018/02/23/goals-for-2018/] I've had over the last couple of years. I blogged publicly about it

tech

Opening Jupyter Notebooks in the right browser from WSL

I mentioned last year [https://rolisz.ro/2020/06/14/operating-system-journey/] that I've slowly moved back to using Windows more and more. In the mean time, my transition is almost completely done. This year I've pretty much booted into ArchLinux to update it, about once a month and that's it.

personal

Half a year as an indie consultant

It's hard to believe it's been more than half an year since I started my own company and became an independent machine learning consultant. It's been a very interesting ride. There have been plenty of moments where the predominant feeling was "what now?". How am I going to find more

blog

Happy 11th Birthday!

My blog has circled the Sun for another year. You got 37 more posts in the meantime. The Obsidian post [https://rolisz.ro/2020/07/28/obsidian/] was very popular, as was the Rust Codenames series [https://rolisz.ro/2020/09/26/playing-codenames-in-rust-with-word-vectors/]. Vmmem [https://rolisz.ro/2020/07/31/

tech

Working across multiple machines

Until this year, I usually had a laptop from my employer, on which I did work stuff and I had a personal desktop and laptop. The two personal devices got far too little usage coding wise, so I didn't really have a need to make sure I have access to

productivity

Productivity Tips: Time Blocks

As I've started my freelance machine learning consulting [https://rolisz.com/] business this year, I found I need better ways to organize my time. When I was employed as a software engineer, there was a task board I would choose what to work on. The tasks would be mostly decided

machine learning

Learning to machine learn

tl;dr: I'm launching an introductory course about machine learning in Romanian. It's aimed not just at developers, but at a more general audience. De ceva timp mă bate gândul să trec la următorul nivel de creare de conținut. Scriu pe blog de 10 ani și îmi place asta. Unele

learning

Design patterns in real life

In programming there are so called design patterns, which are basically commonly repeated pieces of code that occur often enough that people thought it would be helpful to give them a name so that’s it’s easier to talk about them. One example is the iterator pattern, which is

machine learning

How to ML - Monitoring

As much as machine learning developers like to think that once they've got a good enough model, the job is done, it's not quite so. The first couple of weeks after deployment are critical. Is the model really as good as offline tests said they are? Maybe something is different

machine learning

GPT-3 and AGI

One of the most impressive/controversial papers from 2020 was GPT-3 from OpenAI. It's nothing particularly new, it's mostly a bigger version of GPT-2, which came out in 2019. It's a much bigger version, being by far the largest machine learning model at the time it was release, with 175

machine learning

How to ML - Deploying

So the ML engineer presented the model to the business stakeholders and they agreed that it performed well enough on the key metrics in testing that it's time to deploy it to production. So now we have to make sure the models run reliably in production. We have to answer

machine learning

How to ML - Models

So we finally got our data and we can get to machine learning. Without the data, there is no machine learning, there is at best human learning, where somebody tries to write an algorithm by hand to do the task at hand. This is the part that most people who

blog

2020 in Review

2020 might have been a bad year outside, but it was a good year for my blog. I wrote 62 posts, almost as many as in the previous 3 years combined (63). Part of it was due to more time because of Covid, part of it was because of the

phone

World's best phone case

Yesterday I enjoyed the Australian Șuncuiuș Christmas weather while doing another Via Ferrata trail. It was much harder than the one I did last year [https://rolisz.ro/2019/11/17/the-iron-path/]. But as I finished the vertical ascent that is seen in the top picture, my phone slipped from

machine learning

How to ML - Data

So we've decided what metrics we want to track for our machine learning project. Because ML needs data, we need to get it. In some cases we get lucky and we already have it. Maybe we want to predict the failure of pieces of equipment in a factory. There are

machine learning

How to ML - Metrics

We saw that machine learning algorithms process large amounts of data to find patterns. But how exactly do they do that? The first step in a machine learning project is establishing metrics. What exactly do we want to do and how do we know we're doing it well? Are we

machine learning

What is ML? part 3

Yesterday we saw that machine learning is behind some successful products and it does have the potential to bring many more changes to our life. So what is it? Well, the textbook definition is that it's the building of algorithms that can perform tasks they were not explicitly programmed to