Replicating the Foundations: Sutton 1992 and the Alberta Plan As I officially begin my D.Eng, I've been eager to start producing something. My method of learning has always been to understand things "under the hood". I don't feel I fully understand concepts until I can learn them from the …
I am Keith Lawson, a lifelong IT professional and technical enthusiast. I have spent the majority of my career building and managing solutions on top of open-source technologies, driven by a commitment to solving complex problems through engineering and automation. Bio For over 25 years, Keith...
This is my first annual review. Credit to Will Larson's practice of doing this as my inspiration for doing the same. Thanks Will! This year started out with being declined on my application to University of Michigan which led me to explore a whole bunch of different things from continuing …
"If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you'd be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled—have you no shame in that?" — Epictetus, Enchiridion, 28 The Oxford Word of the Year for …
I've completed the University of Alberta Reinforcement Learning Specialization which involved reading most of the Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. In my original and updated RL learning roadmaps I was striving to actually start implementing something. I did get a start on some Pytorch...
I'm a month into my initial Reinforcement Learning Roadmap and a couple things have changed. First of all I've been accepted to University of Michigan Dearborn to begin a Doctor of Engineering degree in January 2026. Second my learnings from the first four weeks have convinced me that I need …
My journey into understanding machine learning began with a 12 week learning syllabus that chatGPT prepared for me. That lead me to the Coursera Deep Learning Specialization which I just completed. The quality of Coursera specialization was excellent and I have a good understanding of the...
I heard the term "Full-Breadth Developers" on a episode of Changelog this morning. While I agree with everything Justin says in his post I have a, perhaps controversial take on new terms that are popping up for developers these days. Software developers today are just what they were when I …
This is a summary of my first 8 weeks following my 12 week deep learning path generated by ChatGPT. The journey focused primarily on Andrew Ng's Deep Learning Specialization on Coursera, which proved to be an excellent foundational resource. Week 1: Neural Network Fundamentals I started with the...
This issue caused me way more time than I would like to admit so I'm writing this blog posting in hopes it will help someone else and save them some time. I'm in the process of making the switch from developing with vim directly on Linux servers to using VS …