Yay !! Starting up my newsletter again #001
Hello everyone, it’s been a while (13 months) since I was looking for an alternate newsletter hosting service. And here I am with Buttondown.
So let’s get started with Naren’s Neural Narrative (I came up with the name while preparing for my Machine Learning Final Exam this Fall).
A tech gadget I have been experimenting with recently
Thermal Printers: I went to the GitHub Universe 2024 conference this year and there was a postcard booth. As the name suggests it was for the attendees to get a postcard as a souvenir. This souvenir had information regarding an attendee’s GitHub commits over the past few years.
This got me curious about using something similar - like a thermal printer to print custom information for people w.r.t their GitHub commits.
So I bought a thermal printer in the recent Black Friday Sale and now I’ll be experimenting (having fun) with it.
Inspiration for this: GitHub Issues Printer
What have I been up to in the past few weeks?
For starters, I was a course Instructor for CS 331 - Database Management System Design this Fall, and I ended the class well with my students (at least I can say that).
This was the first time I was teaching a class as an independent course instructor and it was fun. I mentioned a few points to my students about my hectic schedule in the last class and also told them a fun FIRST DAY OF TEACHING story.
The story goes:
I was too scared to teach on the first day, even though I taught a few lectures during the Summer Semester I was scared. So, on the first day at 8.30 am (Class Start Time), I was nervously walking outside the classroom door. Not knowing what to do I just took a deep breath and went in like it was my class and I knew what to do. Things fell into place and teaching became an instinct in the upcoming weeks.
I told my mom this story and she started laughing. BTW, my mom is a physics and math instructor back in India who has been teaching for the past 21 years. She said, “My first day was the same, that’s how you learn to teach, maybe that first-day nervous teaching experience runs in the blood.”
Well I don’t know if it does, I had fun teaching. I look forward to teaching more !! (if my ratemyprofessor ratings turn out good)
Picture from my last lecture for Fall 2024
As I write this, I am traveling to India to visit my family and enjoy Indian Food (will be posting pictures next week)