Day 4 — My journey to learning how to turn my car into a self-driving automobile

Day 4–02 Dec 2020 — And it’s only day 4…

Yesterday, on my third day in this project, I finished up on the Python fundamentals. Today, according to plan, I took on and quite conveniently finished the NumPy module.

Impressions

Not really much to say, the module had some really useful information in it. I am not ashamed to say that I would most probably forget half the information exercised in these past couple of days. And that is alright, I will not need it anyway until I can actually use it. I expect the concept to sediment when I get to writing up some machine learning code.

I learnt about vectors and vector operations, multidimensional arrays and slicing, reshaping matrices operations and arrays stacking. These concepts are meant to provide a brief introduction into the world of deep learning. I am sure there will be a lot more to grasp, but for now, this would’ve gotten my feet wet.

Thoughts

I like expressing my thoughts, it means I can externalise and formalise them, package them in a way I can actually comprehend the next time I get to them.

As expected, I started to question this whole project and its fundamental purpose (I know, and it’s only day 4…). I cannot help but wonder if what I do will provide me with any sort of value for the forthcoming future. I am an extremely practical person, meaning I never purchase, build or learn something unless I have a deep intent for it.

I do not have the same level of motivation, quite the opposite. I started to feel like I am wasting time.

Why am I writing all these things? Or more importantly, if I recognize all these, why do I keep carry on?

Well that’s easy, because I saw these coming. Knowing me and my way of thinking, I knew sooner or later the day the idea of giving up will begin to sprout. And it comes in waves, it can dissipate tomorrow, but it could come back Friday and so on.

The idea being that working on this project cannot harm me, nor it could ever be considered as a waste of time. I keep on going because this is the normal chatter that keeps us from achieving anything worthwhile pursuing.

Following

Tomorrow I will actually do some Machine Learning. I will deep dive into Computer Vision, specifically finding lane lines. I read about the process and it is quite impressive. I can’t wait to come back with updates.