tech

Omigosh! This is definitely the stuff of dreams. And this is such fresh news. I am feeling giddy with happiness. I just got my digital diploma and transcripts from the school, and imagine my shock when I read at the bottom of the diploma the following line:

Distinction / Mention : “ First Class / Summa cum laude (with honours) “

These are the sweetest words I had been waiting for since I started my master’s degree in autumn of 2021. All my hard work, blood, sweat and tears summarized in that lovely font, in one line of ascii characters, which could have practically spelled, “happiness” or “you did it”. 😀

Once upon a time, I decided on taking a random university degree that was not offered in our province so that I would have an excuse to study in the capital city. And what a fruitful future blossomed out of this total randomness. BS Computer Science was definitely not my first choice at sixteen. I wanted to enroll in Fine Arts. But that was not my calling. And who knew I would be able to practice art and fulfill my destined calling in tech at the same time! Everything in life falls right into place at some point.

After taking this course, I have a renewed appreciation of my experience and skills in the field of Information Technology. I have also developed a lot of interest in different fields of technology, like Artificial Intelligence, Data Engineering, Cloud Tech, etc. It made me realize how far I’ve come. And although, along the way, some people discouraged me, and a lot of people didn’t believe in me (including myself, at times), all it took was a handful of quality people to give me their complete faith for me to be able to have faith in myself.

Faith can really do move mountains.

I should end on this note coz I’m starting to ramble, and sound cheesy and all…

Lastly, I just want to say that my (real) friends and family (especially the hubs and the daughter, my number one fans) are so proud and happy for me. So am I. So please, indulge me with this extraordinarily in-your-face brag post. 😀

Lovelots,

Rio

Yesterday, we had our group’s meeting with our Python Machine Learning Labs teacher to update him with the progress of our project. We are building a Face Detection Application that we could either deploy on the web or as a mobile application. For my part, I used my Data Science (DS) classmate’s model that was pre-trained on SSD MobileNet V2 FPNLite 640×640 with 50000 steps (~0.7s per step) for my web app deployment.

Here is a snippet of the meeting’s recording, showing the part where I presented my work on react.js web app that I have deployed in Heroku using Github workflow actions, something we recently learned this week on our DevOps class.

The teacher was not happy with react.js app due to the overhead of the browser. Heroku was also not the best place to deploy the web app. He was also a bit confused about my colorful bounding boxes coz I was randomizing a list of color codes to display it. He thought it was some error with the detection. LOL! He suggested instead that we go with AWS technologies, Lambda functions in particular, and use Python instead. I think that this was a good exercise for me, and the group. Even though, we are not going to use this deployment in our project, it was interesting to use what I have learned this week in our DevOps class on the subject of CI/CD, and using Github workflow actions. 🙂

Here is the link to the Heroku deployment, if you want to check it out: https://diversity-face-detection.herokuapp.com/

Note that the app takes some time to load, and you will have to allow access to your camera. Also, sometimes, you might need to reload the page to see the bounding boxes.