Nowhere to go... except on Twitter

03 Nov 2020 by Vladimir Haltakov

COVID-19 destroyed all our travelling plans for this year. This meant, however, the time I would usually spend in planning trips or processing photos was now free 🤷‍♂️. So, I invested it into growing my Twitter audience and building my side projects iwanttoreadmore.com and Simple Photo Gallery..

Growing my Twitter audience

I've had a Twitter account since 2009, but I started using it more actively this January. I really started tweeting a lot in August and got some first "results" in September. If you want me to write more about my Twitter growing strategy vote here .

At the end of August I had less than 200 followers. I managed to get 819 new ones in September and 549 in October for a total of more than 1550 currently. What really helped was some mentions from bigger accounts, especially by @svpino. Tweeting without many followers is mostly like talking to the wall, so things are now more interesting 😁.

Twitter stats for Ausgust

Twitter stats for Ausgust

Twitter stats for September

Twitter stats for September

Twitter stats for October

Twitter stats for October

Topics I write about on Twitter

In the last two months I started explicitly focusing on tweeting about machine learning, computer vision and self-driving cars. There seems to be a huge interest in these fields and many people want to start working in them.

Last Friday, Santiago (@svpino) organized an interesting online talk about how to get started with machine learning. He invited me together with @AlejandroPiad and @yudivian to discuss the topic. I found the questions that the people in the call answered very interesting and I think we managed to give them good answers. In a nutshell - it is really easy to start with machine learning if you are a developer! And no, you don't need math for that! Check out fast.ai if you want a good way to get started! If you are interested in more tips for getting into machine learning vote here .

Machine Learning paper reviews 📃

One type of content I started posting regularly is reviews of popular machine learning papers as Twitter threads. The idea is not to explain all the details of the paper, but rather the main ideas and learnings from the paper. The review of AlexNet was especially popular:

Here is a summary of the papers I reviewed until now. More are coming very soon !

Self-driving cars 🧠🚙

I also started a new feature where I describe in more details the different roles in a self-driving cars project. My goal here is to show people that there are many ways to enter the industry - not only as a Machine Learning engineer. More to come here as well .

I also analyzed the recent release of Tesla's Full Self-Driving BETA based on videos from a couple of people posting on Twitter, Reddit and YouTube.

Another popular tweet was my analysis of the different approaches towards self-driving by different companies. There was also an interesting discussion on Reddit.

Cognitive biases 🤔

Another field I find very interesting is cognitive biases. These are effects that make us take irrational or wrong decisions in our daily lives. It is a good idea to study them and try to overcome them. I tried to deliver them as small interactive games. If you want me to post more about cognitive biases vote here .

Building I Want To Read More

I invested some time in building my side project I Want To Read More. It is a service that helps bloggers get feedback from their readers about the topics they find interesting. You can actually see it in action on my blog - check out the small vote links in all of my articles (like this one ). I wrote more about the idea and how it started here.

I got some great feedback from the Indie Hackers community and did a complete redesign of the website. It is now much clearer what the goal is and how it works. I also switched from Bootstrap to TailwindCSS - definitely worth it! This helped me to make the website much faster and hit 100 on all Lighthouse scores.

I suck at visual design, so what really helped me here were the TailwindCSS templates by @Mike_Andreuzza.

Building Simple Photo Gallery

Unfortunately, I didn't really find time to work much on Simple Photo Gallery. However, it got featured in the Unicorn Feed Newsletter by @Mike_Andreuzza. For this, I created a real landing page (instead of the GitHub README) where I better explain what it does. It was also a nice opportunity to get my hands dirty with TailwindCSS.

Landing page for Simple Photo Gallery

Landing page for Simple Photo Gallery

Pumpkin for Halloween 🎃

When I was a kid, we never celebrated Halloween in Bulgaria. This year was the first time that I craved a pumpkin together with my 2-year-old son. He really liked it, but it was hard to keep him away from the knife 😃.

Halloween Pumpkin

My first Halloween pumpkin

Coming next

Whole Europe is now entering a second wave of COVID-19 infections and as it seems travelling won't be possible for quite some time. A small consolation is that I'll have more time to continue working for my side projects... 🤷‍♂️

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