Return-ing to my mission
In order for me to return to you, first I must confess to you and atone for my mistakes. I over-promised and under delivered for you and take full accountability for this. Realizing my mistake was that I made promises based on my ideas as opposed to demonstrated execution. While I saw it working out fairly quickly in my mind, I severely underestimated the impact of some unforeseen events, the amount of resources necessary, and the time it would take to deliver so much so soon. For this, I am regretful and request your forgiveness.
What Happened?
My priorities were misaligned. I made a lot of mistakes and bad judgement calls. I prioritized the wrong people in my life who didn't have my best interests at heart and suffered betrayals. This among other things made me depressed and I began to decline. I reacted emotionally and embarrassed myself which made the depression worse. I don't blame them. I seek no revenge and I wish them the best.
With that said I am healing. I am in treatment and it is working well. To anyone struggling with mental health right now please seek help. You'd be surprised to learn how many successful professionals actually get therapy treatment and change everything.
I don't share this easily but I believe our communities need therapy more than we'd like to admit. Hopefully my transparency about this will help you to learn how to recognize the signs and get help.
The benefits of failures
Learning from my mistakes allowed me to discover what went wrong in my post mortem which included a root cause analysis (RCA). Those failures presented opportunities for me to ooda, evaluate, restructure, and learn how to conduct better experiments with quantifiable value.
I looked at the data and saw what really matters to you. Going forward I will focus my efforts towards delivering more of what I now know is important to you. From this experience I've learned the intrinsic value of data driven decisions. Using that system, small changes in my operations are making an immensely positive impact in the value and quantity of my output which optimized my effort.
I can't make those changes without data (anonymous), metrics, and engagement, thank you. 🙏🏾
My Mission
My mission has always been to help my local and broader Global communities by sharing information from my own unique point of view or perspective and have fun along the way. Watching my city suffer from slow economic growth recently, inspired me to find a way to help ease the suffering and make a real impact. Now I aspire to develop an economic solution for my City, State, Country, and Global community as a result of this unprecedented technological era now upon us.
I don't know how to implement that most effectively just yet. For now, I will focus on the things I can control. I have ideas and I am trying them or experimenting until I figure out what works best for all of us. We're in this together. Please be patient with me.
Restoration with upgrades
With that said I have already begun fulfilling my promises to you by locating and restoring all of my previous blog posts while also posting some new ones. The next steps are to convert and upload them in this new format. Yup, that means some of your old favorites like my Ruby on Rails, Laravel, & C# (C-Sharp) tutorial posts are coming back with some much needed upgrades like containerization, orchestration, and deployment. 2025 will be very fun and interesting!
In this post, I shared various learning resources for people interested in learning Data Engineering and how they helped me learn the relative concepts.
In this tutorial, I covered the official Ruby On Rails installation guide. Along with quite a few extras like installing Terraform, a JVM, RVM, rbenv, and much more... As a bonus, I will include the Bootstrap section this time around.
In this tutorial, I covered how to install PHP. Setup a PHP development environment. Install the Laravel framework, then build and deploy a Laravel app. As a bonus I will include the Deployer section this time around.
In this tutorial, I covered how to setup a C# (pronounced as C-Sharp) development environment. Install the .NET (dot net) framework. Then build and deploy a C# application. This time around I will walk you through all of the steps instead of just pointing you to the resources I used.
Founders Favorites
Don't forget my favorite Founder's Favorites! 💙 These companies inspired me to look into entrepreneurship, building teams and great products that solve problems, and creating employment opportunities. These are not paid promotions, these guys just make awesome, interesting, & super epic sh*t!
In this tutorial, I covered how to install and setup a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system & Extended Detection and Response (XDR) system completely FREE using Wazuh! These are major tools in the defensive cybersecurity toolkit.
In this tutorial, I covered how to install and configure a Remote Development Environment using Coder's amazing platform completely FREE! It's so good I manged to connect and edit code from my phone!
Fast Forward
You've seen where I've been and where I am now. Which leads me to where I'm going. Lately, I've been studying, researching, developing, and experimenting with ML, DL, RL, SL & AI for a while and recorded one of many demo videos shown below.
I've discovered there are many helpful use cases for AI in our society from healthcare, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, robotics, cybersecurity, and national defense systems.
Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, (one of the world’s leading AI companies) shared Machines of Loving Grace, an essay discussing many considerations, dispelling misconceptions and describing even more of AI’s helpful use cases in our society. It is an interesting and enlightening read. I highly recommend it. As it brings all the hype and narrative around AI back into a much more realistic perspective.
Looking at the historical progression of technological advances in our society you might see a pattern of how newer tech replaces the older. Following this trend it makes sense for me to focus on AI, it's applications & use cases. AI has been around for a long time, it is only recently that new architectural advances have made it prominent lately. As I learn more I will share what I can with you and we can learn together.
Demo Day
Long before demo day, I discovered the framework which makes all of this possible and realized it was written in Kotlin. Fortunately, I was already planning a different Android project which led me to go brush up on my Kotlin skills. I completed the pathways in the Android developer's website which paved the way for me to work on these GenAI projects.
I made these apps from an Android framework named MediaPipe, forked & cloned the repo to make modifications and experiment with it. This documentation describes how to get started with the Image GenAI app.
I had way too much fun experimenting with the Image GenAI app and almost forgot to checkout the LLM Chatbot app. After carefully reading through the overview docs I moved on to the Android docs which explained the installation and configuration steps.
After I got the LLM Chatbot app working I moved on to the Computer Vision app. I read through the overview docs first then took some time to wrap my head around the Android implementation docs. I took even more time to learn about the model options, how they're formatted, and custom model options.
Break Time ☕
Reading through all of this documentation for about a week before editing any code and following the steps carefully helped make my experiments successful. 🥳
It was time for a break at that point. 😫
Getting back to work
This time around I will get out of my own way, use a variety of new frameworks and systems to implement sustainable development processes to deliver better outcomes faster. Taking these steps will make these systems more resilient to stress, attacks, and failures. Fortunately, I have followed the 321-Backups rule and kept scheduled backups of my data so I can restore it. Now I just have to sit my ADHD ass down and get all of this work done! 😆