TK Changelog #24
Performance, Blogging, Machine Learning, and Books
Hey, TK here!
Last month I shared how important it is to take a break. This month I decided to share some of the things I've been doing and the reasoning behind some of the decisions I took.
Web Performance
Let's start with a common topic in my blog: web performance. Well, I've been working on a web performance project for the past 6 months. And that's been an amazing opportunity to push myself to study more and advance my knowledge about performance.
In this project, I've been working on the optimization of the INP metric. INP stands for Interaction to Next Paint and it basically measures how fast the website's interactivity is.
Last Friday I published a new long-format blog post about the past 6 months of this project: optimizing and improving INP by ~70%.
Here's a sneak peek:
For the blog post, access here: Optimizing INP for a React App & Performance Learnings.
It took a whole week to write the entire post, get all the data, and synthesize the learnings. Besides the amount of time and mental effort to write this piece, it was definitely worth it.
I got some nice feedback from the web performance community, and experts in the field.
Japanese
I study Japanese for 5 hours straight every Saturday. I've been attending this intensive course for 2 months already and it's more fun than I expected. I feel I'm getting better and better even though the learning process is slow.
Just the fact that I feel I'm learning something new, it feels like I'm discovering a new part of my brain and I'm enjoying it very much.
If you're into language learning or just Japanese, feel free to follow my journey in this repo: nihongo.
Books
Because I've been working on a web performance project, I wanted to hone my performance skills and learn more about this topic. The best way to learn advanced topics? Books!
For this case, I studied how React works on the hood through the Advanced React book. I learned a lot, especially the chapters on “Elements & re-renders” and “Deep dive into diffing and reconciliation”. It is a book worth reading.
Another topic I'll talk about soon is machine learning. I got a book recommendation from an AI/ML professor and I devoured the book. It's called Genius Makers. It's sort of an Artificial Intelligence "biography". It shows the history of AI, since the AI winter and finally reaching the hype we have today. I highly recommend this book. It is such a fun and engaging book to read.
Now I'm reading Breaking Through, My Life in Science by Nobel Laureate Katalin Karikó, and wow, what a journey in science.
Machine Learning
The last topic is Machine Learning. For the first 5 years of my career, I worked as a backend engineer. For the last 5 years, I've been working as a frontend engineer, specializing in web tooling and web performance.
For the past 2 years, I've been studying compilers and programming languages.
Every now and then I ask myself what should I do with my life. What's the meaning of it? What's my purpose?
A month ago I heard of a story of 11yo kid from Amazonas, Brazil. He has an illness called inflammatory linear verrucous epidermal nevus (ILVEN). Because of that, he has pain, he can lose his vision, he was bullied in school, and on top of all these problems, his family can't financially support his treatments. With the support of crowdfunding, we could help him so he can do the surgery and support his treatment.
That story was in my mind for the whole month and what I could do for the world. I want to understand more about medicine and biology, and how I can use machine learning to make progress in science.
If you want to follow my journey in studying machine learning and science, keep an eye on this repository — Science & ML Research — and my twitter.
Gratitude and paying back
My parents gave me everything:
“The incredible feeling of gifting my parents with a trip to Japan 🇯🇵. I'm forever grateful for everything they did for me and I just want them to enjoy every moment of their life.“ — me on twitter.
Because I know they love to travel, this is something that I knew they would love. I want to see happiness in their eyes.
Final words
Well, this was a bit different. I'll keep studying and if you have any resources about science, medicine, biology, and especially machine learning, share them with me.
See you next time.