Looks like the site has some resources for helping to get started.
I've also got a separate resource from a Meetup talk I went to a while back. The speaker is an ML engineer who looked into some LHC datasets and posted a writeup of her talk here:
https://lavanya.ai/2019/05/31/searching-for-dark-matter/
All I'll say to this is that there is a lot of information on this topic that a large part of the population isn't aware of. For example, the concepts of gender expression, identity, and body. There's plenty more to think about and learn, like how this statement above might breakdown when you start talking about someone who is intersex.
That's a very tough question to answer because the two topics aren't as rigorously researched. Quick google searches seem to say around 0.5% of the population for intersex and 0.3% of the population for transgender. But again, those figures are probably problematic and shouldn't be taken as fact.
Mine would be Cassidy William's newsletter: https://tinyletter.com/cassidoo. It's free, but there was a few newsletters where she linked her Venmo/Paypal in case people wanted to support, and I contributed during that time. She's since removed those from the letters for whatever reason. This newsletter is great on a Monday morning because it's light and has some interesting/cool links in it.
Another great one would be Kent C Dodds' newsletters: https://buttondown.email/kentcdodds. Kent is highly active in the React/JS/OS community and he's a super great guy. Same deal here, its free but you can choose to support, which I do from time to time. His newsletters are focused on JS/React and are a bit more dense, but they're interesting.
Definitely not too old. We recently just hired an engineer who had a degree in Biology, got accepted into medical school, realized he loved tech way more, and then went back to school for engineering. If anything, this was a plus for us, because we knew that this was something he was passionate about. I also personally respect people who are willing to take the scarier path because they want to do something they love. Also worth noting that his engineering degree was only 2 years rather than four, since he already had GEs covered and all of that. So your 5 year estimation might be shorter than you think
As ocdtrekkie mentions, the CommaAI is an option that offers a little hand holding in the sense that instructions are available. I actually went through the process of building one and hooking it up to my car and deciphering my cars CAN bus messages. It's pretty interesting and would definitely recommend it.
As for making your own, it depends on how good you want it to be. For example, the CommaAI is simple to do even from scratch but not super cutting edge. On the other hand theres companys out there using additional radars and Lidar which increases the cost and complexity. But in theory you'd just need to mount a machine in the trunk of your car, hook it up to your cars computer (have a car capable of being controlled solely via computer), hook up any additional sensors. Then write the software that can fuse all of the incoming data and use it to send messages to the car.
If this is something you're interested in learning about you can check out Udacity's SDC Nanodegree
So we just went through the process of interviewing candidates for summer internships. Our interview process is far less technical than most and is almost all about determining how the candidate will fit into the team.
I believe it's called Behavior Based Interviews. But basically the interviewing team looks at a list of qualities and picks a few (~3 per person) that they think are valuable for someone joining the team. For example, I chose to look for: Priority Setting, Compassion, and Self Development. Once we have some qualities chosen, we develop questions that are specifically meant to test for those qualities.
Overall I really enjoy this kind of interview process. I feel like these qualities are more important than technical ability, so it's nice to put more emphasis on them during the interview process (We still do assess technical ability of course). And for us, it results in new team members that I'm excited to work with!
> I chose to look for: Priority Setting, Compassion, and Self Development. Once we have some qualities chosen, we develop questions that are specifically meant to test for those qualities.
So all of the questions had some kind of context/primer that I'd talk about before asking them, but the actual questions were:
Priority Setting - Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the work you've been given? How do you manage the work so that it gets done on time?
Self Development - How do go about seeking feedback from those around you to facilitate your personal growth? What is something that you've learned about yourself recently that you found helpful?
Compassion - Tell me about a time where you worked with someone who was struggling, for whatever reason. What were some of the challenges? How did you go about helping them deal with their struggle?
replays are available to people who purchased tickets, I dont think they were posted publicly anywhere. But you should keep your eye on them to see if they have another conference. It is suuuper cheap and online so its convenient (maybe not the highest quality talks, but still good).
What sort of things do you put in them? I don't know about you, but I'm not exactly running experiments. Do you have a format that differs from purpose, procedure, results?
I'll start with the date and a big horizontal line.
For meetings I'll put the start time and a quick header, then some quick notes, usually not even complete sentences, I'm just scribbling things down to remember.
In deep coding, debugging, or infrastructure stuff: I'll keep short notes on infrastructure stuff, URLs, hostnames, ports, function names, file names, lots of breadcrumbs basically. This is often great the next day, where I might not really remember how I got from A to B, but all of a sudden need to make a document describing it for other people to repeat. This is the part that is most like a "lab notebook."
If I'm designing something new or exploring something, I'll often sketch system diagrams or the like. I'll maybe try to diagram flow between components, user steps, basic algorithm steps, etc. Think design document, version -1.
I'll often intersperse TODOs as well, which I'll try to quickly migrate to something real (Jira here at work, or my iPhone tasks list.) I don't use it for task tracking, although I used to do that.
From a developers perspective, if I'm not actively looking for a job I almost never want to talk to companies that are trying to recruit. The one time where I actually went out of my way to talk to a company was when they held their own event. They rented a space with an open bar and brought their engineers with them. You could just go hang out and talk with the engineers and see what kind of stuff they worked on what not and it was a great way for us to vet the company and decide whether or not we could see ourselves on the team.
I've also got a separate resource from a Meetup talk I went to a while back. The speaker is an ML engineer who looked into some LHC datasets and posted a writeup of her talk here: https://lavanya.ai/2019/05/31/searching-for-dark-matter/