Welcome to the Blog!

Me and My Reasons

Hi, my name is Trevor and I've been learning about machine learning for around 3 months. I've decided that I would like to become a machine learning engineer and feel that cataloging the journey in the format of a blog might be useful both me and whoever may one day find themselves reading it.

I'm a huge believer in the idea that communicating an idea to others is one of the best possible ways to solidify your own understanding of a topic. This is exactly the intended goal of starting this blog. Even if nobody reads it, I think there's still lots of utility in writing about how I conceptualize the different components of machine learning. It's very easy to trick yourself into believing that you understand something more than you actually do if you never have to test your hypotheses. In school, these were the people that swore up and down that they understood a subject well and were simply bad test-takers. In the same way that I would argue that the test proves otherwise, I would say that being an ineffective communicator of ideas in a particular domain more often implies a lack of deep understanding about the subjects involved than it does a flaw in communication style.

The Next Few Posts

The way I want to start this blog is by first laying a solid foundation and later marching into territories that rely upon the information in previous posts. Not only does this create some sense of linearity, it should also create a useful mental model and ideology for understanding new topics as they come along. I grew up reading a lot of philosophy and watching online debate content; One of the things I learned is that your lens for understanding the world around you should be stress-tested and cohesive. In the same way scientists and mathematicians consider disparate theories and try to unite them under something more fundamental, I think a proper ideology offers both an accurate predictive model and a compelling narrative.

So understand that I'm not starting this blog at the very beginning of my journey - I've already studied and built my own Deep-Q Learning models, transformers, CNNs, RNNs, and heuristic scoring models. But in the name of building a mental model for machine learning from the ground-up, I will indeed be starting from the ground-up.

As well, you might find that some of the posts do not contribute to this overarching story. Mostly, I plan on writing about whatever LeetCode problems I solved and how I could've solved them quicker. I may also write a bit on politics, gaming, and finance, as these are two areas that I've been interested in since the age of 12. These are motifs and will be labeled as such in the title.

That's All, Folks!

... For now, at least. I look forward to writing some interesting posts soon!