Embark on a new journey in Machine Learning

Hello World..!!! 😃

I am Sai, enthusiast in anything that spark my curiosity. This is my first "Blog" in my life time.

The reason for me to create this blog is, 

    1. So far I haven't thought about this.

    2. I haven't had a endeavor that was long enough for me to keep track of and talk about.

    3. Also, I haven't done anything that was so vast and deep.

So, here I'm, creating my first blog for "Machine Learning". 

Before diving into the topic, Let me tell you a bit of my background.

Basically I'm an Undergraduate in Electronics and Communication Science, did my studies in Chennai, India. 

I am sort of practical oriented person, due to which most often, I doze off whenever there are long lectures or theories that were delivered in a way that I'm not curious enough to listen. 

I was mostly self involved and Intuitive. I always used to ponder upon creative ideas to improve something that are either repetitive or tedious.

My curiosity and eagerness to learn new things, helped me to learn a lot of different things, like about computers hardware and software, graphics design, 3d animation, Photography, stock markets, Muay thai, etc. I became a classic example of "jack of all trades, master of none". Hence, I decided to concentrate on 3 skills or lets say "Hobbies" that matters most for me, one for making me money, one to keep me creative, and one to keep me healthy. 

I intensely believe in continuous improvement, therefore I have always striven to hone these skills or hobbies and try to move them to next level by taking small baby step at a time. Apart from these I have some personal dreams and wishes yet to be set as goals. These dreams, I may not achieve immediately, but definitely some time in future. So.., this is something about me.

How I stumbled and tumbled into ocean of Machine Learning..

Few years back in my career, I moved to project where majority of the works are mundane. As you know, I am not a big fan of such tasks. On meticulous thinking and some research on internet, I found out these tasks could be partially automated if I have some programming knowledge (which was mostly in VB macros or Java or Python). I studied some basic C and C++ programming back from my degree which was all forgotten over time and now had no idea how to write a single line of code. 

Basically I had to start learning programming from the scratch. I was not sure which programming language to chose for my need. So, I started to learn all three VB, Java and Python at the same time, entirely through YouTube and other free resources on internet. After a few tutorials, I found python to be easily graspable for me. From there I focused fully on learning Python. I did complete that semi-automation tasks within 4 months from when I started learning to code💪.

During this learning phase, when ever I look for something in python, a buzz word came tagged along with it (mostly in YouTube ads 😋)....that is. "Machine Learning". Out of my curiosity I started exploring it.

Initially I was flabbergasted!!!! There were tons of jargon and mathematical expressions, let alone the various branches and sub fields. It was very difficult even to know where to start. But, the idea of making machine to learn something without explicitly telling it what to do was intriguing. Therefore I decided, no matter what or however difficult it may be, I will learn this.

My Journey in Machine Learning so far..

My exploration on ML started approximately one and half year back and from then I was on on off for 8 months due to various factors. At one point I was not happy with my progression in this and decided to set it as a goal  and to complete learning this in 3 months, sitting through every weekend (who am I kidding 😐). 

I googled and selected few courses, curriculum and jumped right in. By the end of 3 months timeline, I have just completed only the basics like pandas, numpy and some matplotlib (for those who are new to ML, these are useful add on packages in python that helps in doing ML tasks)

Currently overall 6 months into learning and so far covered some more libraries like seaborn and scikit learn(ML library) and some basic ML algorithms like Linear Regression, Logistic regression, Decision Trees and Random Forest. To put with, my progress to overall picture, its not even 20-30 percent through. Because Machine Learning is such vast area and it requires good understanding and practice. 

To Conclude..

For me, there is still a long way to go, and I am slowly moving towards my goal. I am also happy to share my progress and learning with you. Any feedback will be encouraging a lot. I wish all the best to every one out there who are striving in their journey of their own.