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3 Reflections from a sabbatical after Google
I quit Google at the end of July 2024 and I took a work break until mid-January 2025 (when I joined a startup accelerator full time). It would be a miss if I didnāt reflect on my sabbatical experience! I will describe what I was up to in another post, but in short it was a mix of traveling and hanging out at my home base in Dublin. Here my 3 main reflections!
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How to transcribe long audios fast with open source (colab included)
In this post I will give you code that you can run yourself in Colab (or on your own machine with a GPU), that will allow you to very quickly transcribe long audios in many languages. The setup uses the whisper model from huggingface, Google Drive and Colab. I used it to transcribe multi hour podcasts within a couple of minutes (about 1-5 minutes depending on the length). Motivation Some time ago I was getting frustrated that the podcasts that I was listening to didnāt have transcriptions available.
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I killed my side projects - clean slate
I have recently shut down the indie products Iāve been accumulating over the years, RIP: redeal.app - real estate investment calculator - inspired by bigger pockets, initially scraping daft (irish real estate listing website) invertimo.com - investment tracking and bookkeeping (open source), useful for stocks, funds or any sort of crypto assets if multiple exchanges/etc are used, was integrated with degiro, interactive brokers and binanceā¦ + manual uploads watchlimits.com (that is partially alive as the last version is still available in the chrome store, but the āpremium featuresā wonāt be working) - a productivity extension helping with excessive video watching online I lost motivation to work on these projects, they were either in zombie stage (Redeal/Invertimo) or in somewhat alive stage (watchlimits), but little momentum or financial potential.
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Learning Deep Generative Modelling from Stanford
I am a big fan of self-directed learning, but I have never before spent almost 2 thousands of dollars on a single course. Was it worth it? Who could most benefit from that? I took the Deep Generative Modeling course from Standford online for 1750 dollars. It was a first such course for me and before committing to it, I had some questions and doubts as it was rather expensive. I hope sharing my experience will help out people in a similar situation.
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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
I started writing this retrospective during my last week at Google, I have already wrapped up everything, had my goodbyes. In the spirit of SRE (as an ex-SRE), I thought it would be fun to write a little retrospective in the form of a postmortem. Introduction I joined Google young and relatively inexperienced and had spent about 9 years there. I started my journey in software at 19 (first internship) and then continued working part and full time while continuing my degree in Applied Physics.
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I quit my startup because of comic sans
Okay, it wasnāt really caused by the Comic Sans. I had very fun 3 months of pretty fun collaboration and intense learning, but in the end I had this very clear feeling that I would be better of on my own. It wasnāt awful, but it wasnāt great. There were many small and big things that were making our fit non-ideal, and I had doubts growing in me, and one Sunday night, a pick deck in Comic Sans topped me over the edge to call it quits.
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Two worlds: idea people and developers
I recently attended a startup weekend and was surprised by the backgrounds of the other attendees. As a software engineer myself, I expected to see mostly engineers, but that wasnāt the case. Instead, I found myself surrounded by people with a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences, all of whom shared one thing in common: they had an idea. At the same time, couple months ago started running an Indie Hackers Meetup in Dublin, a software startup meetup that mostly attracts developers.
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Fun indie projects
I wrote in November that Iām taking a break from indie hacking, well, the break didnāt take long (2-3 months). A break made sense at that time, because my project watchlimits.com wasnāt getting traction and I just changed jobs. New job presented a lot of new learning opportunities and as any change was somewhat stressful, so I didnāt want to overload myself and risk a burnout. I am back in a not fully āseriousā capacity.
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I left my Site Reliability job
I left my Site Reliability Engineering job after almost seven years. I didnāt leave Google though, just changed to another role within Software Engineering in the Cloud Infrastructure. I was somewhat unhappy with my cushy role as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager at Google. After quite a lot of deliberation, exploring opportunities and some setbacks (hello, industry layoffs and hiring freezes), I left my SRE job. My last day was October 14th 2022.
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Abandoning the indie hacking dream for now
Iām taking a break from indie-hacking Will I never write a line of indie code again? Obviously not. I love building, sharing and learning. But I am going to stop trying to make profitable indie-businesses for the next couple months or a year. Building things is fun, but marketing a business that has no traction is a grind and a roller coaster. Something that right now I am tired of.
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