imake

It's around dawn here. I just got back to Egypt two days ago after spending time in Germany, Turkey, Canada, and San Francisco.

It's strange how things change. When I left Egypt in late August my plan was to visit friends in Germany for a few days, attend a wedding in Turkey, and then head over to the US to start working with Fomoro, an AI consulting company that I interviewed with a few months ago.

The plan didn't go as expected. While I was in Turkey, Fomoro ended up rescinding their offer, and instead I ended up spending ~5 weeks in Canada with my parents, Esra, and my nephews. I started consulting with Elkrem, a startup that my friends Amr Saleh and Islam Elnaggar had started, and we were all together in San Francisco the past two weeks as part of the Tachyon accelerator.

And now here I am, back in Egypt, and for the first time today, I wake up early in the morning in Egypt and head to the office to work. It feels strange, but in a great way.

I am consulting with Elkrem for another few weeks, then I'll be joining Swvl. I'll talk more about Swvl later in another post.

I absolutely love working with the Elkrem guys. We were a squad of four in San Francisco: Amr Saleh, Islam Elnaggar, Nader Abdelrazek, and myself. The chemistry, the focus, the learning, the productivity, the fun, the challenge has been incredible. It's as if I hadn't felt what it's like to have a great job in years.

While we were at Tachyon, I worked with Islam to build a technical roadmap for Elkrem, and worked with Amr to refine the product pitch. My goals for the next few weeks, as I work on the tech stack of Elkrem, is to explore ways to make the Elkrem team much more productive than they are today. I am super excited about what lies ahead with these folks.

Note: I originally wrote an incomplete draft of this on paper on September 18th, my birthday, and today I am digitizing it and finishing it off.

Today marks my 29th birthday - the last birthday of my twenties!

I am now in Antalya in Turkey of all places. I came to Turkey from Berlin to attend Melissa's wedding, and tomorrow morning I fly out to Berlin again, then Canada the week after.

I have been alone today for my birthday, but don't you pity me. I'm having a glamorous day! What gives today its glamour for me isn't that I've done something crazy, but it's rather an unusual sense of contentment I felt throughout.

The norm for me if I were alone on my birthday as such is that I would feel depressed. I would feel lonely, pitying myself that I'm not surrounded by friends as everyone around me seems to be, and painfully reminding myself that I am lost in life, don't know what I'm doing, don't know why I'm moving around, and don't know what the future holds. My mind would be spinning and spiraling towards stress.

Yet, remarkably, this is not the case today despite having legitimate reasons to feel stressed. The AI consulting job I had spent weeks preparing for and anticipating fell apart unexpectedly a few days ago. Yet, that doesn't seem to occupy my mental space right now - nor anything else in particular, for that matter.

I decided last night that for my birthday I'll do a phone and internet detox, and what a wonder it has been!

I don't recall doing a phone detox before, but it's clear to me that it's something I should do regularly.

I woke up in the early morning for a beautiful stroll around the old city of Antalya. I used the paper map that my hotel gave me to figure out where to go. I must admit, I felt a bit of nostalgia. It's been almost a decade since I used a paper map for navigation. I felt like a little kid unleashing the explorer in him. I felt a lot more aware of my surroundings, unlike when I am mindlessly gluing my face to an electronic brick that's telling me where to go.

After the old city walk, I decided to head to the beach for a swim. I waited by the tram tracks, and started a conversation there with an old Turkish man powered by sign language. Because I didn't have my phone, I wasn't sure when the tram was going to come, or how long does it take to get to the beach. That was a great reason to start communicating with this man, and with the help of sign language he told me that the beach is only a 20-minute walk away. I decided to do the walk.

It actually took me more than 45 minutes to get to the beach, and that's because I wandered around aimlessly and passionately - like a little kid exploring a candy store. I found a small hidden bridge on the way to the beach that lead to a beautiful sinkhole with sparkling turquoise waters. The parks by the coast were delightful, and I stopped in one of them at the top of a mountain overlooking the beach for a lengthy breakfast. Between reading, eating, and enjoying the view, breakfast took well over an hour.

I then moved to the beach for what ended up being a majestic swim. I love the water in Antalya - an intertwine of cold and hot currents. I swam what likely was the longest swim that I've ever done without breaks (1 mile maybe?). After relaxing on the beach for a bit longer and reading, I decided to hit up the Antalya museum, which asking around, turns out that it was just around the corner.

Earlier in the day I had started to read "Sapiens", a book on the history of humanity. It discussed the different types of humans that have roamed the Earth in prehistoric times and how they differed from homo sapiens - us.

Luckily, the Antalya museum had some artifacts and remains of homo neanderthals. It was super interesting to read about them and see them on the same day.

After some lovely meals before and after the museum, I went for a Turkish Hamman and massage - highly recommend it for anyone visiting Turkey. It was certainly a lot better than my terrible Moroccan Hammam experience.

What was most visible to me throughout that day was the mental clarity I had. My attention span wasn't littered with notifications every other minute, and I ended up communicating and interacting more with the people and environment around me a lot more so than usual.

My Turkey trip made it so obvious to me how our phones can really dominate us and hack our attention span and mental clarity, and detoxing from it regularly is the first step I'll be doing to gain grounds in getting back my cognitive and mental space.

I did not mention this yet, but I spent six days in Lebanon before returning to Egypt three days ago. I didn't expect that my visit to Lebanon to be this short, but what was clear to me while I was there is that it was not the right environment for me.

And, to be clear, when I say "it" was not the right environment for me, I am referring to the specific environment I was in while in Lebanon, not Lebanon as a whole.

Staying in Lebanon was surely fun. Abdallah, Aisha, Sarah, and Bilal were all gracious hosts and together we went out and about in Beirut and beyond. While I was there though I was feeling a bit restless. I felt that I wasn't addressing my immediate concerns, and that I was not in the right environment to work on addressing those concerns.

That naturally brings up two important questions: 1) what are my most immediate concerns? 2) What is the right environment to address these concerns?

At this point, I can't even say what my immediate concerns are precisely. On a somewhat vague level, I can say that I want to do something I find meaningful and intellectual while experiencing the world. This is obviously not a satisfying answer, nor is it anywhere near enough to be actionable. This level of vagueness is the perfect recipe to spend all day seemingly working, while in reality spend the day being confused about what to actually do. That's how my days have been as of late.

The environment of choice is of course related to what it is that I want to do, but I think there is a minimum threshold of a few things I ought to be seeking:

• Reliable hi-speed internet access (8mb/s minimum)
• Comfortable accommodation with my own private room.
• A place to work that is near my accommodation premises, but preferably not working from home. A maker space with a great community would be ideal.

While I was staying with Bilal, we had shortage of electricity and water, which tends to be quite critical in the extreme humid and hot weather of Summer Beirut. Antwork, the coworking space Aisha set us up with, had great facilities, but I should also add that it's more expensive to join Antwork in Beirut than a WeWork in San Francisco.

I could've eaten up those costs and found a decent place to stay in Beirut, but I didn't see it that worthwhile to do given that prospects of settling in Beirut are relatively low given the complications of living there and its sectarianism. While a magical place to be in some dimensions, it is certainly an extreme challenge to create a big impact while being based there given the corruption and infrastructure issues, especially as a foreigner.

Anyways, being back in my family's house in Egypt, one of things it's lacking is a place I can work from that has an interesting and intellectual community of people. I'll loosely explore where I can find that while I'm here.

Update [October 11th, 2018]: Although this is a late update, Slim Fish has completed on schedule!

My original plan was to train for eight weeks, but I unfortunately only ended up training for five, as you can see in the workout log. The reason for this is unfortunately due to a minor incident that happened to my shoulder then, and I needed to rest to get it back in shape.

For the past few weeks I've been reading a lot more on nutrition, and I currently following a moderately low carb diet. It has felt really great, and has definitely helped me in slimming down, as can be seen in the before/after shots below:

I think it's clear here the progress made to trim down body fat. There's some muscle loss that's visible as well, but I'd say it's insignificant.

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Following the success of Medium Fish and Small Fish, it's now time, yet again, to start fitness project #3. This one I code-named Slim Fish because, unlike the previous two projects, it has an emphasis on reducing my body fat %.

I'll be following this guide by Calisthenics Movement. I switched fitness plans twice in Medium Fish, until I found Calisthenics Movement and was very happy with their fitness routines.

This time around, Slim Fish will be both shorter and lighter than Medium Fish. I felt that Medium Fish dragged on for too long and I was losing momentum a bit towards the end. In some ways, Slim Fish will be a light break in between larger fitness projects.

I'm planning for eight weeks for this project. Rather than working out for five times a week as with Medium Fish, I'll be reducing it to three times a week in this program. In addition, I'm doing a sixteen hour fast (from early evening to late morning). I've been on this diet for nearly a week and it does feel much better and isn't difficult to follow at all.

I'll be recording all my workouts here. However, almost all the workouts are time-based rather than rep-based, so logging the workouts will just make references to the workout manual I have for the project. As always, I'll post more updates towards the end of the project to observe results.

I would've loved to measure my body fat before and after, but I unfortunately don't have access to the right equipment while here in Egypt and Lebanon. I'll resort to empirical observation from pictures when the project ends.

Deadline: September 18th, 2018 (my birthday!)
Current Progress: Done!

صار لي في مصر ١٠ أيام بالتمام و الكمال، و حينما أسترجع في ذهني أحداث تلك الأيام أندهش من كم الأحداث التي مرت. الآتي هو بعض أحداث الـ١٠ أيام الماضية:

- بدأت مرحلة صيانة لجسمي. ذهبت في أول ليلة لي في مصر لأنظف أسناني. خلال التنظيف اكتشفنا تسوسا في سن من أسناني الأمامية و تمت معالجته. ذهبت أيضا إلى طبيبة تقويم الأسنان لتصحيح تقويم أسناني الأماميّتين، و خلال أيام سيكون المُقوّم جاهز للاستعمال. و أخيرا، ذهبت إلى طبيب أذن لأعالج أذني اليمنى، و التي كانت تشتكي من ألم يراودها بين الحين و الآخر منذ أشهر، و لكن للأسف عجز الطبيب عن فهم السبب.

- أنهيت سلسلة من دورات تعليمية على موقع كورسيرا في مجال الـDeep Learning. بدأت هذه السلسلة من الدورات من ٣.٥ أشهر تقريبا، و أخيرا تمت و أستطيع القول أن مدى فهمي للمجال قد تقدم كثيرا.

- قابلت معتز عليوة و قضيت معه وقتا مليئا بالمناقشات العميقة و الممتعة. أعارني كتابا اسمه Homo Deus، و هو كتاب لمؤرّخ يروي تصّوره لمستقبل البشرية، و بالتحديد كيف التقدم في مجال الذكاء الاصطناعي سيؤثّر على قيمة البشر الاقتصادية و عواقب هذه التطورات على نفسيتهم و إحساسهم بالذات. كان هذا الكتاب يتماشى يدا بيد مع دورات الDeep Learning التي كنت أدرسها، و لا أنكر أن ذاك الكتاب قد شكّل في ذهني اتجاه مهَني أريد أن أسلكه. سأتحدث عن هذا الموضوع بتفصيل أدق في المستقبل القريب.

- قمت ببعض الأنشطة الاجتماعية و الثقافية و الرياضية. أمثلة:

كاياك في النيل مع معتز و أحمد عادل، زيارة مسجد عمرو بن العاص و مصر القديمة، لعب كرة القدم مع مجموعة من الأصدقاء (لم ألعب كرة القدم منذ زمن)، الذهاب إلى معرض الفنون "كايروبوليتان"، زرع بعض الأشجار في مزرعة في الهرم، زيارة مزرعة aquaponics، و أخيرا و ليس آخرا زيارة أثينا في اليونان لبضع ساعات في طريقي لمصر.

زراعة الأشجار في مزرعة في الهرم

كاياك مع معتز و أحمد في الزمالك

صورة مع الأكروبوليس في أثينا، اليونان

التدليك السمكي للقدمين في أثينا

Yesterday was a slow day. I remember waking up close to 9.30, cooked a bad-tasting musli for breakfast, finished an assignment on Neural Style Transfer for my Convolutional Neural Networks course on Coursera, made eggs for lunch, watched a video where Elon Musk talks more about the Boring Company and tunnel-digging, then went off to watch more videos related to that topic. The video about the Boring Company and its technology was an inspiration, and I wanted to learn about how Elon Musk is able to apparently master so many different disciplines. Here's Elon Musk replying to a Reddit AMA about how he learns:

it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

I noticed that I've been starting to adopt a similar style as of a few days ago. While I am studying a topic on Coursera, I'd start by creating an empty sheet for the topic, starting with a question (e.g. what is neural style transfer?), answering that, and in the process more questions come up, and I answer those, etc. I was essentially creating a tree, as Elon Musk was suggesting.

As an example, here's a snippet I wrote while studying Neural Style Transfer:

Mine was top-down as opposed to bottom-up. I'd like to fuse both approaches together.

Later in the day, I decided that I wanted to read more about this topic, and then I landed on a book called "Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning". I didn't end up reading the book, but viewed a summary of it online. The concepts in this book were complimentary to my earlier thoughts:

• People often get confused between fluency and mastery. I can read about a topic several times, but when I keep reading, I am just remembering words and lingo related to the topic. I get the illusion that I've mastered it just because the words seem familiar, but in reality I've just become "fluent" in it.
  • In some way, I've done this for big parts of my deep learning specialization courses online and I want to change that.
• Retrieval is a far more effective technique than rereading. It feels harder, but that's to some extent the point. Challenging yourself in retrieving the content you learned, by testing yourself or writing about it, greatly accelerates the learning.
  • I feel this myself consistently. I remember a few years ago I joined a learnathon where I read and made a five minute presentation about how the GPS works. And, yes, I can still do a similar presentation today as I did then. Going through that process made the concept of a GPS really stick in my memory.
• Interleaved learning is more effective than sequential learning. Say I'm learning soccer, I can practice by playing some penalty kicks, followed by a few corner kicks, etc. The author here argues that this isn't as effective as interleaving these activities together. When I repeat a micro skill over and over, I get the illusion that I am mastering it, but in reality I am relying a lot on short-term memory. It's more fluency than mastery.
  • I am not sure I fully agree with the author on this concept actually, but will let it sink in more.
• Growth mindset is key. Believing that you can has a psychological boost to help you learn the topic at hand, and that's certainly something I felt first-hand.