2017 Goals

11 Jan 2017

Originally posted at medium.com

It is an unspoken custom for everyone to start something new at the beginning of a new year. There are people who want to begin a new habit that would improve their life. There are people who decide to give up a bad habit. And there are people who set out on some challenges trying to get it done before the year ends.

What all of them are essentially doing is setting goals for themselves and embarking on an adventure pushing themselves out of their comfort zone. By the end, they would have made a difference, at least to themselves and the people around them (if not bringing fiction to life), and that is all that matters.

I too have decided to do something along those lines. I have set three goals for the year 2017. Hopefully they will be interesting and give me a fresh experience.

1. 1 commit a day challenge: Commit at least once a day to an open source repository. This could be anything from personal projects to school work to something else that might pop up. But that one commit should be an insightful one. While I do not mean coming up with a new algorithm every day (that could maybe be a challenge for 2018), this commit should not be petty like editing a Readme file. You can track my progress at GitHub.

2. Solve 100 problems on Project Euler: Project Euler is notoriously famous for its perfect amalgamation of mathematics and computer science. Although I have already solved 12 problems before the start of this challenge, I will stick to solving the first 100 problems. You can track my progress on GitHub repo.

3. Implementing Neural Algorithm for Artistic Style: This paper proposes a deep learning network for the creation of artistic images combining various styles. Various implementations of this algorithm keep popping up in my feed. So I decided to implement my own version of this. Since I have little background in Machine Learning, I need to work a lot to accomplish this task. My plan is to implement this in Python using the Tensorflow library.

Those are the three challenges. Now that I’ve put this online, and you have seen this, I need to keep my word and give it my best shot. And in December you will hear back from me regarding my progress on these tasks.

A happy new year to you!

To all Tolkien fans out there who ask me:

“What do you mean? Do you wish me a happy year, or mean that it is a happy year whether I want it or not; or that you feel happy this year; or that it is a year to happy on?”

I say unto you, “All of them at once!”