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Paweł Cisło

Recommendatory Interleaf

Recommendations - Blog post backgroundThis registry was created to catalogue the recently published set of recommendations and share a couple of updates from my side.

Recommendations for Engineers

Section titled “Recommendations for Engineers”

As of today (12/03), my recent list of Recommendations for Engineers managed to appear in my favourite tech newsletter (1st position), hit 2103 page views and 14 stars on its GitHub repository. Those statistics motivated me to spread its existence even further with this blog index, since after its initial release in the last November, it counts 94 commits (updates) and counting (≈ 0.87 commits per day).

Enough on the statistical side, as at that point, you might still wonder what is inside this list that makes me want to brag about it today.

In short, I have aggregated all of my recommendations for aspiring engineers in a single place, coming from various areas of interest. The principal scope supports data science, programming, python, math, cybersecurity, business, and productivity. The entire content has been built for a vast amount of time thanks to my never-ending curiosity. With all of that, I intend to rise a bit of inspiration in everyone, as it already helps myself.

Although it is a personal list, do not hesitate to create a pull request if I missed something interesting or if there is a dead link. Once again, before moving to the next section on a different subject, you are more than welcome to review my:

[su_button url=“https://pawelcislo.com/recommendations/” style=“soft” background=“#138890” size=“4” center=“yes” icon=“icon: star”]Recommendations for Engineers[/su_button]

 

Reason for my recent absence

Section titled “Reason for my recent absence”

Last time, I have been a bit off blog posting since my newest publication in July 2019, but it does not mean I completely forgot about this site and my online presence overall.

Principally, the reason for my absence was a new project to tackle at a railway company – Alstom, which I put a priority on, in order to deliver the best possible result and come back with a valuable experience. Apart from the working hours itself, I used to spend approximately 3 hours a day commuting with public transport, which I managed to use efficiently. All this time, let me consume lots of abandoned books, podcasts and audiobooks, focusing on my French and statistical proficiency.

In all this hassle, I did find some free time, which I used, for example, to scribble down my latest publication, but also to experiment with different learning methods that I am planning to describe in the upcoming posts. Nonetheless, I also had to give my mind a break and rethink my current actions and plans for the future.

[caption id=“attachment_2943” align=“aligncenter” width=“472”]Studying Machine Learning Lately, reading is one of the main activities I devoted myself into[/caption]

Not to waffle on all the news, and to maintain a structured article, let’s have a look at the succeeding sections.

📅 A brief timeline of my last events

Section titled “📅 A brief timeline of my last events”

As this is more of an “announcement” post, I will try to be as concise as possible and summarise below all of my recent activities (from June 2019 till March 2020). Please don’t mind me all the emojis.

🌐 Changes on this website

Section titled “🌐 Changes on this website”
  • 🆕 [June] New post about the art of writing: #10 – The Potential of Perspicuous Writing
  • 🆕 [November] Completely new subsection on Recommendations for Engineers
  • ✍ Updated my article on the use of Todoist with new projects, labels and priorities
  • ✍ Added questions and answers on the FAQ page. Some of the responses have been converted into the Recommendations for Engineers
    • I’ve mainly explained the reason behind each of the individuals that inspires me
  • ✍ More citations in the Favourite Thoughts segment
  • ✍ Redefined objectives in Three Goals. Being honest, it is very challenging to keep up with all these challenges in the face of unscheduled life novelties
  • ✍ Supplementary sections on the About Me page
    • Modified Extra-professional Activities
    • Summary of online presence within My Internet Persona
  • ✨ Redesigned newsletter signup form
  • ✨ Redesigned mobile navigation bar (visible on your smartphone)
  • ✨ Improved layout of the Favourite Thoughts page (it’s a bit more explicit and has a TOC)
  • 👨‍💻 Applied gzip-compressing to improve the site performance
  • 👨‍💻 Improved SEO score of the entire website
  • 👨‍💻 Specified 301 redirections. You can access all the posts using a number within the path, such as this one with pawelcislo.com/11. The same works for my social media, such as pawelcislo.com/twitter or pawelcislo.com/linkedin.

🚹 Latest episodes of my personal life

Section titled “🚹 Latest episodes of my personal life”

This part would definitely challenge my memory if I wouldn’t keep track of my daily journal. Living in the digital era, I also found it helpful to browse my photos with scrcpy conveniently.

Phew… That will be it.

What is next?

Section titled “What is next?”

Now, let’s not dwell on the past and talk about what’s in front of us.

Below you can see a piece of note I reuse to store all the ideas to write about. This year it’s counting 11 written posts (including this report) and 18 waiting in the queue (1.5 year ago it wasn’t like that). For the moment, the subjects balanced between productivity, community events and a few technical matters. The line of ideas waiting to be described still considers a bit of learning-based concepts, accompanied by data science technicalities and other hard skills domains. There might also appear more data engineering topics, such as setting up big data pipelines into production, rather than common analytical procedures.

[caption id=“attachment_2955” align=“aligncenter” width=“1024”]Post ideas As of today, my current list of post ideas in the “To Do” section counts 18 (but knowing myself it is a highly approximate number with my tendency to restructuring and adding new ideas)[/caption]

On top of that, I am considering to convert the entire website to Gatsby.js framework, although I usually receive positive feedback about the structure/performance of this place.

Why Gatsby.js?

Two of my blogging inspirations: Victor Zhou and Tania Rascia are presenting a perfect example of Gatsby’s benefits. Whenever I step on their posts, I take my time admiring the smoothness of transitions between different pages and the overall user experience. In fact, I’m formally coming for the exceptional content they produce concerning machine learning and web development.

Transfer from WordPress to Gatsby.js is surely time-taking and pretty stressful, but in the end, it’s full of positives. Mainly, we’re taking advantage of the increased performance since our website becomes a single page app (SPA), which results in no reloads while traversing the HTML documents. Above all, this is an excellent web dev practice with a focus on JavaScript, which is especially important to me for the D3.js framework!

Any particular plans for 2020?

Section titled “Any particular plans for 2020?”

Back in January, I have shared my initial set of intentions on what to prioritise for the next 12 months. Let’s have a look and reflect on them after the last 2.5 months.

[caption id=“attachment_2942” align=“aligncenter” width=“406”]My plans for 2020 My sketch of 2020 from January[/caption]

January was filled with Python, Tkinter and RegEx. Later, 1st half of February was taken by tech conferences, The AKKAdemy graduation and exploration of the Swiss mountains. Now, my mind is mostly focused on data visualisation in D3.js, putting more effort into my French fluency and preparing for the practical experience in data engineering (Hadoop ecosystem, Docker and Kubernetes). Apart from that, I will try to present more projects with the use of AI, such as a simulation of self-driving car.

Summarising: so far, so good. Although this year didn’t start well for the global population as we already know from the news, I believe that for me it’s heading in the right direction. Reminding myself of the last point from the aforementioned graphic, I shall not forget to have fun throughout this process, and not stress as much if things do not work as I planned.

For the moment, let us all do our best and enjoy our life. Till next time!