Progress on SegSort, weekend Hampi trip and my fifth half-marathon! | Weekly Report 74

30 Jan 2018 . category: report . Comments
#myntra #data science #travel #fitness #vlog

My weekly report from the 22nd of January to the 28th of January – a fun and fulfilling week, grateful for the life i’m living! #GaryVee!

At work, i’ve been getting some good work progress under the belt – we have a paper deadline that is pushing development work! Wrote a map-reduce job to fetch user affinities across my brand communities, and using these affinities to cluster users to get those macro user segments.

I’m learning up on a new concept – Implicit ALS(Alternating Least Squares), that uses the implicit signals of a user’s behavior(views, clicks, purchases etc) to find latent user and brand embeddings(much like Word2Vec). These embeddings would capture an overall sense of the user behavior which could be extracted by cosine similarities(or recommendations). Development is underway, next step would be to cluster these latent user vectors. Ultimately, every market segment would then get a product feed which would be the average of the segment’s users’ affinity vectors.

Hope this isn’t too much jargon, i’m bad at breaking down math into english!

Lately, i attended some good meetings and some bad meetings. The agenda is very clear in the good meetings, decisions are taken fast. Bad meetings strech on forever, without conclusions, and the two sides don’t seem to budge down on their thought process. “Disagree & Commit”(one of Amazon’s values) seems to be the best option that should be taken here. But frankly, i’m not really comfortable doing that, takes courage. And practice.

I’ve been reading “Born to Run” off-late, its basically a documentation of the world’s best ultrarunning tribes in Mexico. The author takes you through their lifestyle, through countless stories, and scary anecdotes. Initially, just thinking about a 50-mile race gave me the chills, but after a while i became immune to the nonchalance with which the author has described these runners! Almost a third of the book done, finishing it by month-end.

I uploaded a short tennis vlog this week, have a look!

Plan to put out three vlogs this week, super-ambitious :p

This weekend, i headed to Hampi for my second trip! i was under the impression that i was done seeing the major attractions, i couldn’t have been more wrong. i went in with absolutely zero planning, bought a guide-book and just went with the flow. Climbed up unexplored boulders, went up a couple of hills, discovered spooky caves, and fell in love with the rock carvings(and so many shivalingas!). i met quite a few foreign travellers, and each gave me a new persective towards life and travel. Talked to a retired 70+ Californian, who was on his 10th India trip, and had been travelling for 6 months every year for the past 5 years. Blows my mind. If i can maintain my ambitions, my curiosity till that long, i’ll consider this life fulfilled.

i ran the Hampi half-marathon this Sunday, 21km in 01:56:15(although the Nike App told me i’d run further!). This might be the most beautiful marathon route i’ve run, Satara lost! I experienced the Runners’ high for the better part of 5 kilometres. The smile on my face didn’t go off, i gave high-fives to so many runners, clapped for everyone, shouted along with the little kids, it was just beautiful. i hadn’t been this happy in a long time, endorphins are real as fuck. Aniket also ran 12K - a big mental breakthrough, happy for him! Post-run, chilled at the cafes nearby, watched the Aus Open finals sleepily, and took the return bus from Hospet in the night.

Felt good writing this blog, onwards and upwards!

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