Week Notes 2024#1

Evergreen

Created: 2024-04-22 Updated: 2024-11-03

I've been going without coffee all week, having a couple of cups of matcha instead. I thought I'd have some caffeine withdrawals, but I was totally fine. I have less overall anxiety; probably the only thing I get anxious about is resisting coffee itself. There are little moments when I want a cup of coffee mostly for comforting reasons, like when driving, that are the hardest to resist.
I chatted with some recruiters, and a couple of conversations are scheduled for next week.
I dropped my wife off at the airport early Friday morning; she comes back this coming Thursday. She'll be in Phoenix, then Tucson, visiting friends and family.
I switched to a paper bullet journal this week for day-to-day stuff. My organizational tools are up in the air at the moment, and I find it grounding to use a notebook for now.

In deeplearning.ai and pdf benchmarked

Finished the "Preprocessing Unstructured Data for LLM Applications" course https://www.deeplearning.ai/short-courses/preprocessing-unstructured-data-for-llm-applications/. Applicable to much that I will do in the future (resume + job description = custom resume, for example).
I'm part of an inaugural cohort of folks in an effort that DLAI has put together to help people put the skills that they are learning into open source projects.
- Working in 4 weeks sprints
- In a group working on a PDF benchmarking tool to evaluate how well different PDF scraping tools work for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) apps
- I started out by building a Python Click application with an extendable plugin system so anyone can add new tools to evaluate.
- Towards the end of the week, I started working with Microsoft's AutoGen project for building AI agent systems. I successfully built a prototype with half a dozen agents working together, some using tools, to accomplish different parts of the task. This involved reading files, summarizing, and comparing texts and PDFs. I'm super excited about AutoGen!