2023 has gone by so fast. What did I do this year? Here is my 2023 year in review as a data scientist and as a human being. I write this for me to look back and remind me what I did this year. Otherwise, I would feel like I have done nothing.
Dutch citizenship
I am so glad that I passed all the language and culture exams and applied for the Dutch citizenship this year. After 5 years living in the Netherlands, I am finally studying Dutch in a proper way. Would be a shame becoming a citizen and not speaking the language at all 🥲
Work
This year is rather a successful year at work. I got an exceptional performance and a promotion. One of the products I developed using GenAI gets quite some attention and complements, it was also featured at a few events at the company. Colleagues from other teams reached out to me to borrow the code so that they can build similar application for their teams. I am super happy that my hard work is seen and recognized by the boss.
Body and soul
This year, I started picking up bouldering. I realized how much I am afraid of the height. It is funny because as a kid, I were always climbing, on the walls, on the trees. And then you grew up, you stopped climbing.
So it is really interesting to do bouldering, you feel like being a kid again. Bouldering is a combination of physical strength and tactics which makes it even more fun.
I still maintain my piano class and I start taking singing lessons too. Would be so nice to play your favourite song while being able to sing the song as well!
About mental health, I still suffer a lot from imposter syndrome. I did three Master (can you imagine haha) and after 5 years of working in the data field, I still feel like I don’t know anything. I even want to do another bachelor degree to understand things better. But I try to tell myself it is okay. Over the years, both studying and working have taught me that with enough motivation and a sprinkle of curiosity, you can learn just about anything. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Reading
If you ask the most successful people out there like Elon Musk or Bill Gates about how to be successful, they will always say, read, read as much as you can. So I feel like, if I am not going to read, I will suck. Therefore, I started 2023 with the ambitious goal of reading 1 book a week. Life and work got busy, so that of course did not happen 🤣 I was too ambitious. After the first 2 months of the year, in stead of having read 8 books, I read only 2. I had to refine the goal into one book a month. And these are the books I have read in 2023 (plus 3 Dutch language books if that counts):
1. Artificial Intelligence and Data Science:
- Atlas of AI
- Modelling mindsets
- Designing machine learning systems
- Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness (a long paper)
- Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis
2. Geography and History:
- Prisoners of geography
- A concise history of modern Europe
3. Personal Development and Soul
- How to win friends and influence people
- Daring Greatly
- My Sweet Orange Tree
- Discover your True North
- Man’s Search for Meaning
- Ten influencing skills
I love all these books, but I do have my most favourites. If I have to pick one for each category, it would definitely be “Designing Machine Learning Systems” by Chip Huyen for Data Science. The books explains a whole lot of important Machine learning and data science concepts and Machine Learning Ops practices. Chip has vast amount of knowledge covering all aspects of data science projects. I can imagine myself keep going back to this book whenever I have problems and need guidance for my data science projects. I also like Chip’s writing style, it is very engaging.
From the general knowledge topic, “Prisoners of geography” is an amazing geopolitics book — well apparently I read only one geopolitics book this year so it must be the best 😄. I feel so so much smarter after reading it. You should definitely give it a try if you have not read it, you will not regret.
Regarding personal development, “How to win friends and influence people” was unbeatable. I read it in my early 20 and did not like it so much. Now in my 30s, everything mentioned in the book just clicks and makes perfect sense. And “My sweet orange tree” was a touching book about the childhood of a 6-year-old boy Zeze. I have not cried for a very long time and I was crying like a baby while reading the book. It really nurtures my soul ❤️
Writing and publication
This year, I managed to get two research which are both my Master’s thesis published in peer-reviewed journals. Super happy about it.
And wow, I actually had no idea that in 2023 I wrote 17 blog posts on Medium, mostly about data science concepts, machine learning, generative AI and and data science careers.
One of my last articles of the year ”GenAI products - move fast and fail” got some attention. In this article, I shared my struggles with Generative AI projects and I found some comfort knowing that I was not alone on this journey. Many others are navigating the same challenges in their AI journeys. It is great to share and learn from each others.
It was just writing that article out of blue in just a few hours and did not expect much from it. The next thing I knew, a few hundred dollars went to my account as so many people were reading and interacting with it 🤑 Writing on medium is so unpredictable, because the previous month before that article, I was earning only 39$ for all my articles.
Speaking
I have a big fear of public speaking and I feel like I can express myself better through writing. But I really want like to get better at speaking! What better way to get better at public speaking than giving talks on the topics I am passionate about? So I started to speak at some conferences and also various events at my companies:
Public speaking always had me on edge. I usually could not focus on anything else before my talk, that becomes worse especially when life got hectic. Like this one time, work was crazy, and I barely had time to prep. I was still tweaking slides on the morning of the event! Luckily, I was actually not that nervous during my talk and I think it went just fine. It is like jumping into the cold water in the winter, once you are in, you are just fine.
As the year went by, I started to chill out a bit about speaking. I told myself that nobody actually cares if you made a mistake. As long as I deliver useful information, I will be satisfied. There is always room for improvements, so let’s agree that it is good enough to make it close to perfect 🙂
What surprised me is that, I even received feedback from colleagues that I am a very strong presenter. What a nice surprise. So, you never know! If you are passionate about something, don’t let your fear of speaking in public stops you, talk about it and keep talking about it many times. You will get better I promise.
Family
This year, another big dream came true. My farther and my brother came to visit me in the Netherlands and were were able to visit a few other countries in Europe. Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Hungary. I hope next time my mom could join as well and we can visit more countries.
There are goals that I set at the beginning of the 2023 but did not manage to follow up. But that is ok, I will continue this year.
If you have read til this end, thanks a ton for reading. Let’s keep learning and growing together in the next year! Now I am going to boudering!
