2022 Reflections

Purpose is critical for the success of any endeavor. I wanted to start this blog with a purpose statement. This purpose may change over time, however, if a purpose doesn't change it probably means you've made it or you are stubborn. I certainly haven't made it. My first purpose in having this blog is to become a better thinker through writing about my reflections, hopes, and learnings.

In my experience, it is hard to be a good thinker, that is, to have things well thought out. I have also noticed the strong connection between writing and thinking. One who thinks well, can write well. One who writes well, can think well. The two go hand in hand.

This year has been mainly about learning for me. I graduated from college and started my career. I have learned so much from the people around me about programming, working in teams, and relationships. I have tried to reflect on my experiences in this last year and try to understand what I need to change to improve myself. I want to set my trajectory in the right direction. I want to set myself up for success.

This year has been full of excitement and learning. This year I finished my masters program and graduated with my BS and my MISM degrees. School was rewarding and something that I really enjoyed. I am very grateful for the education that the IS program in the Marriott school gave to me. I have realized in the past few months that some of the best value that my education gave to me was the network of super awesome people that I have met and become friends with. I have more recently tried to make a concerted effort to stay connected to the people from my program that I respect and admire. I have recently been to several “catch-up” meetings and they have been really great!

Another great part of 2022 is all the traveling that I have been able to do. My wife, Victoria, and I were able to travel with her family to Mexico early this year. This was a great and relaxing trip. One thing that is actually really hard for me is sitting down and relaxing. I have a hard time sitting still in the sun. It was a really great opportunity to spend time with my wife’s family in a new and exciting environment. We got to visit Chichen Itza and repel into a cenote. We continued our travels to Sweden to spend the summer. One of the trip highlights was when I was able to experience my first midsommar festival. Another was being able to spend several weeks at the cottage in western Sweden. While I was there I helped make a new flag pole for the cottage, which was really fun. During our time in Europe we were able to take a week and visit family in Norway. We traveled to northern Norway to my father-in-law’s childhood home and was able to meet many of his family members and learn a lot about him and his childhood. We then traveled to visit some more family near Oslo. We had a lot of memorable stops along the long drive including: Trollveggen, Trollstigen, Geirangerfjord, and Runde. Later in the summer we traveled to Poland, Czech Republic, and Austria. This was a very memorable and much anticipated trip for me because I was able to return to the Czech Republic and visit many of my friends that live there. It would be hard to fit that entire trip into this post, but some of the major highlights of the trip were visiting the auschwitz camps, showing Victoria all the places that I lived and the memories that I have of all the cities, going to new places like Karlovy Vary and Hluboká nad Vltavou. We learned a lot about how to travel in Europe for an extended trip. Renting a car proved to be a painful process, so I learned the value of thorough research before the trip. We ended our trip in Vienna and flew back to Sweden. I hope that this year sets a pattern for Victoria and my life. One of my yearly life goals is to visit a new place and learn something new about different people, cultures, languages, places, and traveling. We will see what 2023 brings…

Although traveling has been a large part of 2022, the biggest change that I have experienced this year is starting my career post-graduation. My career started with a lot of reflection and help from many mentors and supporters. My wife and my in-laws were a huge support to me as I was trying to figure out where I wanted to go. Another mentor came into my life that gave me some great advice, he said something to the effect of, “you are being really vague and non-committal to what you actually want to do with your career. It is so much harder to help someone that doesn’t actually want anything specific.” With that advice I sat and reflected about what I truly loved and what that meant for me and my career. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to pursue my hobby of natural language and combine that with my love of programming and creating. In school, I loved programming and considered pursuing a minor in language localization, but found it difficult with my schedule. With this new-found direction, I decided to pursue a career in software development that had something to do with natural language. I jumped on LinkedIn and scoured the site for any open positions in language companies. I talked with several that brushed me off, and then stumbled upon Emmersion (an AI-based language certification company). I messaged the CEO and the rest is history. I am super happy that I can work with a product that I love and with really talented team members. I learn so much from them everyday. The way we work (lean and mobbing) is highly collaborative and very different from the typical dev team. I love it. Because we all program together, I have been able to learn a ton and feel very confident in my abilities as a software engineer. Emmersion has been the best start of my career! I have been able to receive a lot of mentoring and development over the last 8 months or so. My current work situation is very different from the job that I had before Emmerison. That job, however, gave me a lot of great experience that has helped me realize the value of mentors, pipelines, tests, lean development, collaboration, and passion. I am very happy with Emmersion and I hope that they will be able to provide me with the career advancement that I need, because I would like to stay with them for a long time. 

Although I value the 9-5 and the stability that a salary and classic career give me, I am attracted to the idea of starting a software company and becoming a technical founder. I don’t know what that looks like, but Paul and I have started with the idea of a dual text reader that will bring the power of reading to the everyday language learner. I would love to more seriously build this out, but I definitely need help. Paul is also passionate about it, but it's hard when we are both trying to make things work at the start of our respective careers. I hope that I will be able to get a few books on there with a good enough interface to prove the concept. I would love to contribute to people’s ability to learn language. Hopefully 2023 will prove successful in the sense of learning and opportunity to grow this idea, code base, and possibly supporters.

This year has been monumental for me in many ways, but one of the most important parts of my life is my family. 2022 was basically the first year of my marriage to Victoria and I have learned a lot about her and myself. One thing is for certain, I want to be a better husband and person in 2023. I look forward to developing hobbies and skills with Victoria including the woodworking that we have done together. We have made a set of vases from ash and also a set of candle sticks. We have also made several ornaments from old Christmas trees. We have started to build out our inventory of woodworking tools including a lathe and a drill press. Woodworking is a noble, lucrative, and fun hobby for both me and Victoria. Looking forward to the different projects that we have to look forward to in the near future.

The year hasn’t been perfect. I have made many mistakes and there have been many challenges, but through the negative I try to always be an optimist and a supporter. I anticipate that next year will bring more challenges, but I hope that all the good things in my life become stronger because of the hard times. 

I want to summarize and highlight some of my reflections and learnings over the past year.

Reflections:

People who “go for it” are often rewarded for it. I want to be one of those people.

Through all the chaos, family is the thing that grounds me and makes me the happiest.

I have been able to stand out because of my drive and competence. This is a powerful combination.

I don’t read enough.

 

Learnings:

When trying to find opportunities with work, it really helps to have a crystal clear understanding of what you want to do. 

If you don’t prioritize it, you are actually deprioritizing it.

Cut out things that don’t add value to your life. You’ll be surprised at the time you have left after the time-wasters are trimmed out.

 

Looking towards the bright future of 2023, I want to lay out some of my hopes.

Hopes:

Our family grows and everyone stays safe and healthy.

Opportunities to grow Jensen’s Woodshop and the dual text reader idea.



Here are some random stats about my 2022 that might be interesting.

2 degrees earned

Duolingo streak is going strong (639 days)

I’ve experimented with language tutors in Czech and Swedish. The experience has been great using preply.com!

1,581 Spotify minutes listened (numbers are way down thanks mob programming)

2 woodworking machines acquired

3 new countries visited (Norway, Poland, and Austria) Returned to 3 foreign countries (Czech Republic, Sweden, and Mexico) 

Popular posts from this blog

Phonetic Posteriorgrams

Image
For my MSc dissertation, I am trying to synthesize speech with variable L2 accent strength. There are a few ways to approach this. The "fastest" and "easiest" way is to have the perfect dataset that has reliable labels for accent strength on each utterance. There are two problems with this approach. First, this dataset would be incredibly difficult and expensive to create. Second, it is difficult to get a trusted label for "accent strength" that is also consistent across the dataset. What does accent strength even mean and how would it be measured non-subjectively? I was talking about this problem with one of the PhD candidates in the CSTR group, and she told me to look into phonetic posteriorgrams. Since then, I have tried to read a bit about them. I wanted to explain them in this post.  What is a Phonetic Posteriorgram? A phonetic posteriorgram (PPG) is well described in it's name. Phonetic indicates that we are talking about phonemes, or speech cate...
Read more

The Hard Part About Speech

Image
The rise of Large Language Models (LLM) in recent years has certainly made a lot of people see the world differently. I believe that many people are more interested in statistics, machine learning, computer science, and linguistics because of these fantastic advancements, myself included. As I have studied intensely at the University of Edinburgh over the last year, I have realized more about what these kinds of models do, and how they relate to the bigger picture of modeling functions in general. All of these models are doing some form of function approximation/prediction task. Language models like GPT or BERT are simply predicting the next word token given the context, Automatic Speech Recognizers (ASR) like Whisper are predicting the text output given a waveform, Text to Speech (TTS) models like Amazon Polly are trying to predict the spectrogram or waveform given the textual input and who it should sound like. There is always a task, a dependency, data, and a metric to measure that ...
Read more

Robotic Voices and Speech Synthesis: Experiments with Unit Selection

Image
This is the paper that I wrote for my Speech Synthesis class in semester 2 at the University of Edinburgh. Building a unit selection voice was a lot of fun, especially getting to record our own voices. Learning unit selection help me to understand a lot of the basics and fundamentals for the state of the art technologies because they are all trying to solve similar problems with different approaches. Here are some sample audios from my synthesized voice. "She sells seashells by the seashore." "I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream." These are very robotic, but this was state of the art not that long ago and cool that it is built with a database of my voice recordings. Abstract Unit selection in speech synthesis, an aging technique dating back to 1996, remains a fundamental method for synthesizing speech. This paper explores the theoretical principles of unit selection, its practical implementation, and its implications for modern speech syn...
Read more