Introduction - young software engineer

[user0001]

Hello everybody,
I will try to present myself the best I can, although it is not the thing that I am best at.
I will present here a little bit of my story to give context and present the conclusions that I draw for that.
I always welcome feedback, if you think that I am wrong on one point or one other.
I read a lot of books but I think that nothing is better than direct personalized feedback.
I speak french, so forget me if I am not clear, or make mistakes.
Before starting I would first like to thank MJ DeMarco for the time he spent to write the books that allow people like me to aspire to a better life.

My journey to becoming an entrepreneur began when I was 22 and in the last year of my studies, I decided to do my master thesis abroad.
I struggled with social contacts for some years, and after trying to meet new people where I lived, I wanted to make a big leap and face the unknown.
Now that I speak about it, it did not seem that hard, but at that moment, I was really afraid to meet people that I did not know (like very afraid).
When there, I progressively learned, did go to parties, and after 2 months or 3 had the impression that social skills were not the thing that I needed to be happy.
I started researching different topics, starting combat sports, reading books, and my journey to self-improvement began there.
My idea was and is that what makes me happy is thriving towards a goal, to give meaning to my life. A why can beat any how.
It is at this time that I decided that I wanted a better life, and found a little while after the books of MJ DeMarco.

When I graduated with a diploma in electrical engineering, I realized that I had not much to offer to a potential employer, although I had a pretty paper to show.
From the idea of other books (the 80/20 principle), I decided first to focus on choosing a set of skills where I had an advantage of compared to other people, and that could be valuable in startups or companies.
That is when I decided to learn AI and machine learning... don't need much social skills for that, and I saw that I had an advantage for coding during my courses at the university.
I learned all by myself and learned much more valuable things that I did during my studies.
I began doing many projects and found a job 1 month after to develop models to do facial recognition, find age and gender using the face of someone and emotion recognition for a company that wanted to use it for commercial purposes.
I learned a lot during this time but could not stand the culture where I worked.
If I finish my work in 2 hours, why do I have to stay 6 more, must I work less efficiently?
Why do I have to work in a cubicle with 4 other people, can't I work from home, why not if I am more productive?
I was paid the same that other employees, although I think that I bring a lot of value to the company, but was paid like a junior that can't do anything by himself.
So I quit after 5 months and tried to start a blog with AI tutorials with applied project examples. Like how to use a neural net in a mobile phone to do object recognition.
I tried that for 3 months, and got in total 300 users I think, and only 1 stayed more than 10 mins on a page, and it was my dad (thanks dad).
I realized at that time that I could not work alone like that ( I moved away from my family), and I don't know how you guys do it, but these months felt like shit.
I barely got the energy to get up and had to use all my willpower to even write less than 1 page a day. I think that writing is not for me neither. I have a lot of respect for people that are capable of doing this, like MJ DeMarco, but it is not my case. I think I would end up killing myself on that road.

After that, I had an offer to more near Paris and work to develop models to detect pathologies in medical images, and thus helping doctor diagnose easier, and reduce errors on their part by doing a pre-analysis. And at the same time, help pharmaceutical companies have concrete metrics to work on to decide if a drug has a positive effect or not ( like the total area of the pathology of a patient from month to month). But it is the same environment as the last work. But now I am working on the side in a startup with 3 other people. I have read here that it is not ideal to work with other people, but it allows me to keep motivated to an extent, and slowly learn soft skills for when I will build my own company.
The problem I face now is that I don't like what I do. It is difficult to wake up. I don't want to work and feel very little satisfaction in my everyday life. I wonder if it is because I feel guilty if I have time for leisure, and only want to take time for work and sleep. I end up watching more videos on youtube that I think I should and feel guilty about it.
Any advice on how to balance work/ leisure in the long term and keep the same commitment?
I wonder also how much energy levels and diet have to do with success in the long term.
Some days I wake up with full energy and crushing it, and sometimes barely even can leave the bed, even if my willpower is the same.

To finish, I wanted to share some ideas of the start-up I want to build in the future so that you can share with me what you think.
It is ranked from the easiest to implement to the hardest.
1) Building a system with AI that would run on devices like raspberry pi and inspect pieces in factories with a camera and AI to check if they are well manufactured. This is currently done by human workers, but I think it could be automatized. So that it could be faster, more reliable, and cheaper. With a good dataset, it could be done.
2) Build a program to extract the big five of someone from a text he wrote, and extrapolate the results so that an employer and a tenant can evaluate the applicant with this tool, by just asking a motivation letter. I have read psychology papers, and the big fives seem to be a good way to predict future employee performance. And the big five only uses linear relationship ( standard stats). With a neural network, you could predict future performance even more, and allow companies to gain a lot of money since the difference between good workers and bad workers is important. I don't think that the current methods of selection are very good at detecting gifted people, for software positions for example.
3) Build an app where you enter your mode of lifestyle (hours you sleep in average, what kind of food you eat, ect. ) ( still thinking about), then a picture of your face, an audio recording of your voice reading a standard test, and the app would give you a probability that you have certain diseases. Like colon cancer, or so on. It would allow saving lives of people that have certain diseases but don't know it. I think that it is feasible. I witness a PHD presentation of someone that predicted Parkinson disease 3 years before the main symptoms by using a voice recording, with a 75% correct probability, and without even using state of the art techniques for the model. The problem is: how to create the dataset? It seems very hard for me because I would have to screen a lot of people for a lot of diseases, select the correct lifestyle metrics, and so on. But it is a project that has a lot of potential in my opinion.
4) Using generative adversarial networks to render video game images more real in real time. I saw the other day someone that used hyper resolution algorithms, anti-blurring algorithms, and super fps algorithms to enhance a cinematic from an old video game, and it must say that it looks good (even if it can still be better). It is something that could become important in the future, but I think I would have to work in unity as an employee for that.

Thank you for reading !
I hope it was not too long.

 

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