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- [{"authors":null,"categories":null,"content":"","date":-62135596800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"section","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"2525497d367e79493fd32b198b28f040","permalink":"","publishdate":"0001-01-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"","section":"authors","summary":"","tags":null,"title":"Rohail Taimour","type":"authors"},{"authors":[],"categories":null,"content":" Click on the Slides button above to view the built-in slides feature. Slides can be added in a few ways:\nCreate slides using Wowchemyās Slides feature and link using slides parameter in the front matter of the talk file Upload an existing slide deck to static/ and link using url_slides parameter in the front matter of the talk file Embed your slides (e.g. Google Slides) or presentation video on this page using shortcodes. Further event details, including page elements such as image galleries, can be added to the body of this page.\n","date":1906549200,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"a8edef490afe42206247b6ac05657af0","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/event/example/","publishdate":"2017-01-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/event/example/","section":"event","summary":"An example talk using Wowchemy's Markdown slides feature.","tags":[],"title":"Example Talk","type":"event"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["musings"],"content":"Dig deeper if youāre hesitating Itās been a while since I wrote my last entry! Itās been a busy period with the adaptations needed in oneās life after they become new parents. Itās been challenging to say the least. However, writing new entries doesnāt take as much time once youāve put your mind to it. Which brings up the first question Iāve been pondering ever since I decided to write a blog: Is this platform a digital garden for me to test out new ideas or more a place for me to unleash and make sense of my inner world?\nThis blog entry is clearly one of the latter. And this is not a journal entry either, which would be rather more personal in nature. These entries stay on the web for the foreseeable future (unless I take them down myself).\nAnd the answer to the main thesis of this blog entry is ofcourse also: all of the above. This was one of the primary reasons I have categories for each of the main topics Iām planning to be writing on. So deciding to write on one topic does not at all preclude the other. That micro-decision, however, is where the issue begins. It presents the perfect opportunity to ruminate over getting certain details right that donāt really matter at all.\nI know that I certainly fall victim to this now and again. Iāve been thinking for sometime now to finish writing the series on the scraper. There remain a number of ideas remaining to tackle in that series and thereās a few lazy shortcuts I took Iāve been looking to rectify.\nThen on the other hand, I have the third part of the series on decoding myself. The values that Iāve chosen to base myself off, to guide me through life if you will, leave a lot of room for interpretation. Circumstances over the past few months, with the birth of our daughter, a change in job, the industry Iām working on, and Iāve even started having regular jam sessions with a band as a drummer. These are exciting times and have left me with a lot to reflect and ponder over.\nThis explains the stream of nature blog entry we have here because itās a reaffirmation of what this blog is ultimately about: mostly unfiltered expression.\nItās about showing up: make it happen! Most of my efforts so far have focused on setting up the website, learning the different pieces of the puzzle when it comes to statically generated websites. My goal was always to avoid spending too much time editing the content that I put out. The tools we have today allow us to run into loops editing things to our hearts desire. For example, I read somewhere that some of our favourite bands, when they recorded albums, would only get one take to record the whole thing due to technology constraints of the time. These kind of constraints mean that firstly, you need to have mastered your material to the point where you can do everything in one take and secondly, that some mistakes are bound to creep in. I think there was probably a far more tolerant view of these mistakes at the time.\nWhen it comes to my writing, I can be quite accepting of itās imperfections. That is, unless, Iām actually writing software. In the imperative paradigm of programming, where you have to give the computer complete instructions of what needs to be done, for the program to perform as expected, we need to provide sufficient instructions. Hence, these instructions require a certain amount of rigorousness, thinking of different edge cases: some of which you are only bound to find at runtime or when the users of the software use it in unexpected ways.\nI was hesitating to write because I have been inundated with a rush of new information, whether it was from technologies I was encountering in my recent role, or technical books I was reading at the moment. The book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, for example is a classic and has left me with a lot of food for thought. Itās fundamentally changed the way I look at any application I work on in the past. However, writing an article discussing it becomes more of a research endeavour, demanding a somewhat rigorous attitude. And hence, the procrastination.\nThe key takeaway here is that itās more important to show up, to write blog entries, whatever they may happen to be, than to curate the non-existent entries you will have on your website. Clearly I had projected this website to be more of a technical playground and was stuck to that idea instead of letting the entries come and for the website to organically grow as it will.\nThe tendency to go for over complicated solutions, or planning for solutions to problems that donāt exist yet is far too common. I see it all the time amongst developers, and I catch myself doing this far too often. I recently spotted this in a drumming context, where I saw how different playing in a band can be compared to practicing on your own. Since the past few months that Iāve been playing drums with a guitarist and bassist, itās increased my sense of musical awareness and forced me revisit some basics I had started to gloss over. Concretely speaking, ā¦","date":1709059766,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"ffe9a8dd64af79d10d3d751cf1718a25","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/analysis-paralysis/","publishdate":"2024-02-27T19:49:26+01:00","relpermalink":"/analysis-paralysis/","section":"post","summary":"Exploring how curated I want this blog to be. Is it a technical playground for me to test out ideas or a flowing stream of consciousness, i.e. musings.","tags":["self-reflection"],"title":"Falling Into Analysis Paralysis","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["drumming","musings"],"content":"Milestone unlocked: My first band Iām part of a few facebook groups where people post about looking for jam partners or asking for information about where thereād be live music playing in Brussels.\nI made a similar post in one of these groups asking for information about a place I can book a practice room that contains a drum kit. As you would have it, by a matter of pure luck, I got in touch with someone looking for a drummer. It seems he happened to see one of my post looking for a rehearsal room and decided to get in touch for a few projects he was part of.\nItād already been a while Iād been looking to play along with folks to get to that next level as a musician. Practicing and improving your techniques is something I really enjoy but at the end of the day, we play our preferred instruments to make Music. This was something my drum teacher always told me, that all technique and tools at our disposal ultimately are only meant to serve the Music.\nMoreover, there are certain aspects of playing music, which only come from playing with each other. There is an element of communication, improvisation and when these elements come together in a natural manner, thereās nothing thatās more satisfying.\nA new reason to practice, a different focus altogether! I would be the first to admit that I can get quite geeky about percussive instruments in general. For about 8 months I picked up the tabla, a percussive instrument prevalent in the musical tradition from the subcontinent. Thereās a few obvious reasons to be fascinated by the tabla. I grew up listening to the instrument and had a natural connection with the rhythmic tradition. Secondly, this is a percussive instrument that can be tuned in different pitches, making it sound like a melodic instrument in the hands of the right person. Go check out this video by the Maestro Zakir Hussain if you want to see that in action. However, whatās really the most amazing part of the tabla is that the tradition requires one to master the rhythm vocally before attempting to play it on the instrument.\nEach sound that tabla can make (and thereās a lot of them), has been assigned a vocal counterpart. This is a very rich concept can be adapted and applied to the drumset setting and leads to some very creative practice ideas!\nExplore vs Exploit: When to know you need to keep digging in deeper While itās been such a fantastic journey to learn about the Tabla, I eventually had to put it on pause because I saw I was spreading myself too thin. As a weekend warrior of sorts, when it comes to playing my instrument, you canāt let your limited number of practice hours be dispersed across different activities. You can, ofcourse, but there is a very hard tradeoff to be made here when youāre counting on seeing progress in your playing, as a way to stay motivated in your practice sessions.\nMaking that decision wasnāt easy. I have the impression human beings hesitate before committing to something. We want to keep our options open. Why? Maybe because itās easier to make mistakes as a beginner but more difficult to show up when you realize how much incremental effortās really needed to realise something. Taking the tabla as an example, I would have had to train my fingers to be able to articulate the notes properly. This is an exercise that develops slowly, as you develop the muscle memory over sustained and focused practice. I saw this from my own experience when I started playing the drums using the āOpen handedā style. In a nutshell, this style implies that a right handed player would need to develop their left, weaker, hand to lead on the instrument. It took me months and even a couple of years before I started to notice my left hand feeling on par, or at least in the same category, as my dominant right hand. Thereās a number of advantages to being able to play this way and having gone through the steep learning curve, I can now take advantage of a higher degree of ambidexterity on the drum kit. Had I been unable to commit to this approach at the start of my drumming journey, I wouldnāt have been able to meet this drumming milestone.\nHowever, while it is imperative spending time in the Exploit phase, honing in on skills slowly and steadily over time, you cannot ignore the Explore phase. Indeed, trying the tabla or even Open handed drumming when I first started was the result of the Explore phase. It was something that I decided to move into the Exploit phase once I decided committing to it.\nExplore periods can have a wider spectrum range than you might think At one point, I thought that this stage is about looking into big ideas. As seen in the figure below, that an Explore phase, necessarily entails a high amount of uncertainty. Iāve come to see this phase a bit differently more recently.\nI believe that we are constantly walking on the blurry line between Explore and Exploit. In digging deeper, in the Exploit phase, you start to notice more and more details, nuances, that were simply ā¦","date":1698940202,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"d7f4969e52868d149605b8b3f48353b5","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/post/2023-11-02-i-joined-a-band-as-a-drummer/","publishdate":"2023-11-02T16:50:02+01:00","relpermalink":"/post/2023-11-02-i-joined-a-band-as-a-drummer/","section":"post","summary":"Playing drums on your own is totally different from playing in a band","tags":[],"title":"I Joined a Band as a Drummer!","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["musings"],"content":"An article harder to write than expected When I first created this website, my primary goal was to create series articles: Write mostly technical content that needed exploring over a series of posts. This desire sprung from the large number of posts I had read online, which would introduce a topic at an introductory level and leave it at that. Oftentimes, I wanted something that went a bit deeper and far too often, google searches would amount to nothing in the end. Every once in a while, however, Iāve come across authors who took a more series oriented approach. Iāve benefitted immensely from such series, for example, while making this website. Hugo, the engine iām using to render this website from markdown content, didnāt ship with a very natural way to create series blog posts and I had to put something together for myself. Adding this functionality delayed my launch ( publishing my fist article) far longer than I care to admit (ahem, 6 months).\nWhy say this all anyway? Have we gone off topic when this article was about how to embed your prioritized values in your life? Well, yes and no. The short answer is, I wish there was this one golden tip, or even a few, that I could share with you, which would magically allow you to get clarity around your values and find ways to embed them in your day to day life. I certainly wish it was possible to be described within a thousand word article. I delayed \u0026amp; hesitated writing this article, hoping for an epiphany in the meantime, that Iād be able to share with you. This last point prevented me from writing more \u0026amp; eventually I broke through it with the article \u0026amp; here I revisited my motivations for even putting this blog together. I hope what Iāve come to learn is still worth sharing.\nValues are only words you breathe life into The first few years of COVID had been a time of real introspection for me. Iāve come that once youāve decided on a few values to live by, embedding them in your daily life still has some pre-requisites. Itās a process, which will be personal to you \u0026amp; which would evolve much as you evolve as a person. Wait a minute though-if weāre evolving as a person, then are our values also something that need to be revisited? If our reference, the values \u0026amp; our process to embed them, are both changing, then how do we make any sense of it all? In my experience, you do not need to revisit your values every fully moon cycle. You can, if you want. However, if you earnestly went through the process of defining them the first time, Iād leave it at that. This is because values in themselves have no meaning. They are only words. Itās your actions, what they mean to you and how you decide to live them that brings those words to life.\nAt a given point in time, you shortlisted āvaluesā from a list of 100. You made tradeoffs and assessed how you saw yourself. For example, loyalty, strength \u0026amp; patience. If you had to choose one of these, and I presume everyone would choose differently, can the choice of these words really change who we are? Does choosing strength mean loyalty becomes any less important? That I think patience is only for idiots? Of course not. Whatās important here is to take note of the mental process which led you to choose one value over another. Making that choice is critical to reduce the noise and to have a sense of direction. The tool weāve just achieved will help guide us when weāre in need of direction. When thereās a moment youāre faced with a tough decision and youāre able to water down that conundrum in terms of values that you feel are conflicting with each other.\nValues are like post-it notes Remember writing reminders on the palm of your hand for something youāre likely to forget? Maybe you didnāt need to do that like I used to as a kid, but the point is these values are little post-it notes for you to use for course correction. Anytime you hesitate \u0026amp; feel lost you can revisit the choice you made to be a certain version of yourself you had envisioned at a time of clarity. Another reason why itās not so important to get too attached to the value itself is that your interpretation of the value will keep changing as you move through life. Strength may mean something completely different to a youth in the prime of their life and an elder with decades of wisdom behind them. Your attachment to the word keeps deepening as you keep revisiting it, letting the words sink deeper \u0026amp; deeper into the palms of your hand.\nThe importance of having space in your life There is a crucial ingredient in making any of this work. You can choose your values, commit to them, but without having āspaceā in your life, you wonāt get too far. Iām talking about mental space where you can look inside yourself; be willing to make some decisions about who you aspire to be. It is critical that you understand and appreciate that these are choices YOU are making about yourself and that these choices are more important than many other choices we make in our day to day life. These ā¦","date":1698755184,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"37445a5ec76387cf6e0a9c9cf8c56855","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/personal-values-part-iii/","publishdate":"2023-10-31T13:26:24+01:00","relpermalink":"/personal-values-part-iii/","section":"post","summary":"Identifying your core values is just the beginning to living them.","tags":["self-reflection","personal growth","life lessons","core values"],"title":"Part III: Bringing your values into your daily life","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["musings"],"content":"Values exercise In my last article on the subject, I stressed the importance of having a set of values to inspire you to make the tough decisions. The toughest decisions for me often involved saying no. No to something cool I wanted to do, without first finishing something else I had started. Itās okay to change your mind about whatās important to you, as long as thatās not erratic.\nI received a lot of help in getting this clarify from Kris, who supported me in identifying and shortlisting the top most values I held dear. Naturally, this was an iterative process and I believe this is an exercise one can revisit multiple times since your values may slowly shift over time. Heading into this exercise, I had the following goals, in no particular order and non-exhaustive:\nBe super clear on the different roles I āidentifyā with Find ways of making āsustainableā progress on each of the identified roles above Cut out procrastination from my life so I can move forward with my identified priorities Refine my productivity systems to get the most out of them without overwhelming myself Having tools and systems I can fall back on to handle moments of anxiety and uncertainty Understand better what makes me tick and refine how I āchannelā my attention Learning to appreciate the moment as it is instead of trying to control it Find ways of channeling my creativity in ways that are healthy and donāt consume me Revisit some of the fundamental beliefs I held about myself and the world around me As can be seen, this wasnāt a short list of goals and I headed into my sessions with Kris with an open mind and heart. My one and only true goal was to come out of these sessions in a place where I was content with where I was.\nYour attention as a spider web Everyoneās likely had that moment when you are suddenly able to separate you, the one who notices, from the voice in your head. Oftentimes, it is a momentary experience and soon enough youāre back to being completely identified with that voice. That voice in your head, if allowed, can completely take over how you perceive reality. Through the process of self-reflection and writing a journal during certain crucial moments, I noticed how fickle your though process can be. Trying reading what you wrote ten days ago and how far removed you may feel from your own thoughts that felt all-encompassing the moment you were experiencing them. This was a revelation to me and to anyone interested in hearing someone describe these concepts can look upon The Artistās Way and The Untethered Soul.\nAs mentioned in The Untethered Soul, the voice in your head is like the annoying room mate that you canāt get rid of and you have to learn to live with. This voice has a tendency to create a spider web where the fundamental beliefs you hold about yourself would pull you in and trap you from being to see things for how they truly are.\nWhile this revelation already did wonders in how I began to deal with certain situations in my life, make sure to take the time to respond, rather than reacting. Making sure that my actions were grounded in the values I cherished rather than from a place of fear, insecurity, etc. Nevertheless, I will speak about three ideas in particular which made a huge difference in my life:\nAchieving goals may need you to make sacrifices The choosing is losing mindset. Better to keep my options āopenā āThe myth of the āperfect timeā for tackling big challengesā Sacrifices needed to achieve your goals Most of us desire better than what we have today - but what are you willing to give up to achieve those goals? This one was an eye opener for me when I saw how I could change my āvictimā mindset, where I was expecting things to be a certain way without really giving up something in return. Iām normally super vigilant about viewing myself as a āvictimā in a given situation. I think itās very natural for us to fall into that pattern since itās very convenient to shift responsibility to something external. This self-defense mechanism prevents us to feeling āless thanā since the reason weāre not where we want to be is not in our control.\nEverytime Iāve noticed this mindset, Iāve immediately resolved it by finding ways that I can either influence the situation using levers that are under my control and if the situation is truly outside my control altogether, to simply find ways to come to terms with the situation. Find a way to accept the situation as it is: stop fighting reality.\nIn my previous post in the series, I talked about the time I started waking up at 5 am in the morning to get consistent around my drumming. I started doing this because I began noticing the voice in my head making excuses for me about how ābusyā I am and how poor old me isnāt able to progress on their goals because there just isnāt enough time to prioritize drumming.\nPrioritizing things means making sacrifices and at that point in time, I started to question the number of hours I REALLY needed to be able to function well ā¦","date":1698337471,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"9dcb90c7c8f6dd71a8848ff8596bccf7","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/personal-values-part-ii/","publishdate":"2023-10-26T18:24:31+02:00","relpermalink":"/personal-values-part-ii/","section":"post","summary":"In this thought-provoking sequel to 'Decoding Rohail,' I explore the transformative power of identifying core values, making conscious choices, and overcoming procrastination. With insights from my own journey and references to influential books, this post serves as a comprehensive guide to self-reflection, personal growth, and life lessons.","tags":["self-reflection","personal growth","life lessons","core values","conscious choices","overcoming procrastination"],"title":"Part II: Unearthing Your True North","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["musings"],"content":"I came across this quote from the book āEssentialismā by Greg McKeown earlier this year which very nicely encapsulates some of the learnings and insights Iāve had over the period since COVID. The quote goes like this:\nSpace to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make\nBuying my first drum set I think the COVID period forced many of us to reconsider our routines and how we process everyday events. One of the best things that came out of COVID for me was to act on a childhood dream of mine - to learn to drum!\nI grew up in a house where we enjoyed listening to different types of Music. I can relate to Music in a way thatās helped me go cope with the challenges life throws at you. Listening to certain songs would transport you back in time to a certain moment in your life so Music holds transcendental qualities for me. While I certainly enjoyed air guitaring to some of my favourite guitar solos like Pink Floydās comfortably numb, Drumming is something that had an inexplicable allure for me. The raw energy and force that drumming is able to convey - the rhythmic elements of Music was something I naturally inlined towards. And on March 30th 2020, my life was forever changed.\nYamaha DTX 452 Drumming at 5 am in the morning Iām very glad I have an understanding wife and neighbours that didnāt complain about the thumping sound and vibrations from my bass pedal. With drumming, I suddenly had a whole new world open up to me. Youtube was my friend and I would take advantage of platforms like Drumeo to learn enough of the basics to get started. I had always been an avid music fan but Iād never learnt music theory and now suddenly, I realised that if I really wanted to make the most of online material in my learning journey, Iād need to learn how to read music. Thankfully, reading drum notation is rather straightforward compared to other instruments (or so I think). Things were all well and good until I realised one day:\nHow do I make the time to practice and reach the drumming goals Iād set for myself?\nIām quite a goal oriented person and so naturally I had set ambitious goals for myself. These goals were different from the ones Iād been setting for most of my life, which would often be related to studies or work. These were goals where I didnāt care as much if I went off track. They were more like a north star and had the ability to steer me back on course if I went too far astray.\nLo and behold, I saw that the best way for me to make the time to practice was to start waking up at 5 am in the morning. Yes. 5 am. I had tried practice at more reasonable times but it just wasnāt consistent. I had never thought thereād by anything that would make me jump out of bed this way. And now Iād found it. And I was jumping out of bed. During COVID. The drums helped me stay sane - though likely at the expense of my understanding wifeās sanity š¤£.\nI was experimenting with different material, playing along to songs I loved and even started learning to play open handed where instead of crossing your hands so your right (for most people, dominant) hand is on the hihat keeping time and you use your left hand on the snare. By playing open handed, as a right handed drummer, I was using my left hand to keep time, which meant I was using it on average 4 times more than my right hand. This was incredibly awkward and frustrating in the beginning. However, I stuck to it and configured my kit to suit this style of playing too:\nHi hat (left) setup incredibly low for open handed playing A typical practice session eventually came to be an hour or more of playing between 2-3 exercises, on a 15-20 minute break. Sound boring? I found it to be rather meditative actually. This setup was a result of a lot of self-reflection on what makes a good practice session. Benny Grebās Effective practicing for musicians had a lot of wisdom to share on the topic and much like Essentialism, the message was the same: Choosing is not losing. You need to make choices to go deeper and further on your topic of interest. This is especially true for something like drumming where there is more than an analytical understanding that you need to undertake to execute a particular pattern on the drums. You need to literally drill that pattern down into your body to the point where your muscle memory can take over and execute the pattern instinctively at will.\nComing to this realisation wasnāt easy. While itās great having all this information on our finger tips with platforms like youtube and social media but these platforms are also a constant reminder of the different wayās that youāre not enough where you are right now. We are constantly bombarded with what we donāt know, whatās cool and hip right now and 10 ways for you to {{ insert a hyped up skill here }}.\nFailing to choose is also a choice The learnings I had from drumming could be easily transferred to other areas of my ā¦","date":1698310245,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"1a5c4ab4717828b6b08a853e44b681db","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/personal-values-part-i/","publishdate":"2023-10-26T10:50:45+02:00","relpermalink":"/personal-values-part-i/","section":"post","summary":"In this edition of 'Decoding Rohail,' I delve into the transformative journey of self-discovery and personal growth spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. From buying my first drum set to reevaluating life priorities, this blog post explores how the quarantine period became a catalyst for meaningful change. Discover how I balanced the rhythm of drumming with the tempo of life, and what it taught me about setting personal values.","tags":["drums","COVID-19","self-reflection","personal growth","life lessons","productivity"],"title":"Part I: Quarantine Chronicles: How COVID-19 Helped me look inward","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["technology"],"content":"Motivation Remember that period when most parts of the world were in a lockdown due to COVID? Yes, weāre nearing the end of 2023 and COVID seems like a distant memory at this point. However, like I imagine many of us, I suddenly found that being restricted in movement and social interaction to a large extent, I had a lot more time at my disposal. This was also a time where my wife and I realised that we could have more space for ourselves so each of us could have an office setup we could be happy with. This also being a time of low interest rates to encourage consumption in the economy, it was an especially interesting property market.\nThis seemed as good a time as any to write a scraper for Belgiumās most popular property listings website: immoweb. My desire for this first version was to first, be able to have a very general idea of the Brussels property market. Thereafter, I would launch this script every few days to look at the new properties. The output of this script would be a CSV that Iād use to spot good deals and have all the relevant information Iād need to schedule visits.\nImplementing the Proof of concept I was running this script from a windows machine at the time and having done a scraping project once before already, knew that Iād start with selenium for the browser automation and parsing of the html. The setup required that I choose a browser and a corresponding geckodriver (with the appropriate version for your browser) to go along with it. Iāve used firefox and edge browsers (and their respective drivers) for different iterations of the scraper implementation.\nAfter messing around with developer tools, looking into the domās containing the information I was looking for using inspect, I had a script that was doing the job. I made a conda export of the environment I used for the scraping in case I ever needed to revisit this work again. This script did the job and I was quite happy leaving it at that with an environment export so I could pick up from this analysis when needed. This version of the script can be found here for those who are interested.\nA sidenote on Bayesian statistics For the longest time Iāve been a fan of Bayesian statistics. Being able to explicitly encode your modelling assumptions in the form of priors, as well as being very deliberate in reconstructing the data generating process of the phenomenon youāre modelling. You can visually verify how well your model is generalizing by doing what is called a posterior predictive check. The computational aspects of MCMC sampling also appeals to the nerd in me, while the convergence of your sampler gives indications about how well-informed a hypothesis you have for your data generating process. An ill-formulated model will simply not converge, unlike a number of other approaches which would always give a solution and then youāre left to figure out if youāre overfitting or underfitting. Then there is the fact that you are always able to work with distributions of your phenomenon of interest rather than relying solely on point estimates like we would in most other methods. Thereās a number of fascinating things that are possible with these posterior distributions, which include bayesian decision making. I will link to a great discussion on the subject by Thomas Wiecki on the subject here where we can see how to use our models to directly show the impact of uncertainty on real business metrics rather than arcane statistical metrics such as mean squared error, f1 score and the like which donāt hold any real business meaning.\nNaturally, I have my bias for these methods and using these models bring their own challenges. In some cases, traditional machine learning approaches would give better performance without sacrificing interpretability and help you reach a conclusion faster than using these bespoke modelling approaches. Nonetheless, I was on the lookout for an opportunity to find a dataset where I could exploit the natural hierarchical structure of data in a hierarchical modelling or the flexibility of Gaussian process modelling to capture the intricaties of non-linear processes. The link shows the distinction between modelling the same problem as a regression vs using a gaussian process smoothing model.\nRevisiting the implementation once again Any data scientist or machine learning practitioner will tell you about their struggles with data. Itās either data quality (or lack thereof) or just the lack of data itself for performing interesting analyses. Then it suddenly occurred to me: property data is perfect for the experiments I wanted to conduct.\nScraping property prices over time gives the opportunity to model property prices over time and ask interesting questions, including, but not limited to the following:\nAre rental property prices growing at the same rate as purchase properties? Do we observe a similar growth rate across different communes? Are properties in the same commune priced similarly and if so, how much does this ā¦","date":1698156840,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"5b49bc16d699569b9faaa7c1093cee21","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/a-scraper-that-scales-part-i/","publishdate":"2023-10-24T16:14:00+02:00","relpermalink":"/a-scraper-that-scales-part-i/","section":"post","summary":"Explore the journey of building a robust web scraper for analyzing Belgium's property market. Learn how we transitioned from Selenium to Beautiful Soup for efficiency, used Poetry and Typer for better dependency management, amongst other tools. This blog is part one of a series aimed at creating a scalable data collection and analysis tool","tags":["python","web-scraping"],"title":"Part I: The Motivation to Build a Scraper in Python","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["musings"],"content":"Exciting News: My Website is Live! š\nHello everyone, and welcome to www.rohailtaimour.com! I am incredibly excited to announce that my website is officially live. š\nBuilt it Myself with Hugo š ļø\nIn the tech world, there are countless ways to build a website, many of which offer quick and easy solutions. However, I chose to take a different route by building this website myself using Hugo. The journey was challenging but immensely rewarding, providing me with hands-on experience that goes beyond just writing code.\nHosted on GitHub Pages with GitHub Actions š\nOne of the most enlightening aspects of this project was learning how to host a static website using GitHub Pages and automating the deployment process with GitHub Actions. Surprisingly, this was not as daunting as it sounds, and I found the experience to be relatively straightforward. Keep an eye out for a future blog post where Iāll document this process in detail!\nCustomized to My Needs šØ\nThe journey didnāt stop at just building the website; Iāve also customized it to suit my preferences and needs. This involved tweaking the template to accommodate blog series, implementing a contact form, and even adding the ability for visitors to comment on blog posts. One challenge still ahead is optimizing the website for SEOāturns out my MySpace account is incredibly resilient in search rankings!\nWhatās Coming Up š\nThis website will serve as my digital canvas. Iāll use it to share my insights and experiences on a range of topics: from Python development, machine learning, and data engineering, to open-source technology frameworks and beyond.\nYour Feedback is Welcome š\nFeel free to explore the website and let me know what you think. Your feedback is invaluable and will help me continue to improve this digital space.\nThank you for visiting, and stay tuned for exciting content!\nš www.rohailtaimour.com\n","date":1697500800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"d82060c7e468c61c4075a1ad9b4f47b8","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/post/20231017-hello-world/","publishdate":"2023-10-17T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/post/20231017-hello-world/","section":"post","summary":"Rohail Taimour's blog!","tags":null,"title":"Welcome to my Website! š","type":"post"},{"authors":null,"categories":null,"content":"- block: collection id: talks content: title: Recent \u0026amp; Upcoming Talks filters: folders: - event design: columns: ā2ā view: compact # - block: portfolio # id: projects # content: # title: Projects # filters: # folders: # - project # # Default filter index (e.g. 0 corresponds to the first filter_button instance below). # default_button_index: 0 # # Filter toolbar (optional). # # Add or remove as many filters (filter_button instances) as you like. # # To show all items, set tag to ā*ā. # # To filter by a specific tag, set tag to an existing tag name. # # To remove the toolbar, delete the entire filter_button block. # buttons: # - name: All # tag: ā*ā # - name: Deep Learning # tag: Deep Learning # - name: Other # tag: Demo # design: # # Choose how many columns the section has. Valid values: ā1ā or ā2ā. # columns: ā1ā # view: showcase # # For Showcase view, flip alternate rows? # flip_alt_rows: false ","date":1696896000,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"bb238c2d1697da0a6715e7e8c8299cef","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/project/","publishdate":"2023-10-10T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/project/","section":"","summary":"- block: collection id: talks content: title: Recent \u0026 Upcoming Talks filters: folders: - event design: columns: ā2ā view: compact # - block: portfolio # id: projects # content: # title: Projects # filters: # folders: # - project # # Default filter index (e.","tags":null,"title":"","type":"landing"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":null,"content":" Create your slides in Markdown - click the Slides button to check out the example. Add the publicationās full text or supplementary notes here. You can use rich formatting such as including code, math, and images.\n","date":1554595200,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"557dc08fd4b672a0c08e0a8cf0c9ff7d","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/publication/preprint/","publishdate":"2017-01-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/publication/preprint/","section":"publication","summary":"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis posuere tellus ac convallis placerat. Proin tincidunt magna sed ex sollicitudin condimentum.","tags":["Source Themes"],"title":"An example preprint / working paper","type":"publication"},{"authors":[],"categories":[],"content":"Create slides in Markdown with Wowchemy Wowchemy | Documentation\nFeatures Efficiently write slides in Markdown 3-in-1: Create, Present, and Publish your slides Supports speaker notes Mobile friendly slides Controls Next: Right Arrow or Space Previous: Left Arrow Start: Home Finish: End Overview: Esc Speaker notes: S Fullscreen: F Zoom: Alt + Click PDF Export Code Highlighting Inline code: variable\nCode block:\nporridge = \u0026#34;blueberry\u0026#34; if porridge == \u0026#34;blueberry\u0026#34;: print(\u0026#34;Eating...\u0026#34;) Math In-line math: $x + y = z$\nBlock math:\n$$ f\\left( x \\right) = ;\\frac{{2\\left( {x + 4} \\right)\\left( {x - 4} \\right)}}{{\\left( {x + 4} \\right)\\left( {x + 1} \\right)}} $$\nFragments Make content appear incrementally\n{{% fragment %}} One {{% /fragment %}} {{% fragment %}} **Two** {{% /fragment %}} {{% fragment %}} Three {{% /fragment %}} Press Space to play!\nOne Two Three A fragment can accept two optional parameters:\nclass: use a custom style (requires definition in custom CSS) weight: sets the order in which a fragment appears Speaker Notes Add speaker notes to your presentation\n{{% speaker_note %}} - Only the speaker can read these notes - Press `S` key to view {{% /speaker_note %}} Press the S key to view the speaker notes!\nOnly the speaker can read these notes Press S key to view Themes black: Black background, white text, blue links (default) white: White background, black text, blue links league: Gray background, white text, blue links beige: Beige background, dark text, brown links sky: Blue background, thin dark text, blue links night: Black background, thick white text, orange links serif: Cappuccino background, gray text, brown links simple: White background, black text, blue links solarized: Cream-colored background, dark green text, blue links Custom Slide Customize the slide style and background\n{{\u0026lt; slide background-image=\u0026#34;/media/boards.jpg\u0026#34; \u0026gt;}} {{\u0026lt; slide background-color=\u0026#34;#0000FF\u0026#34; \u0026gt;}} {{\u0026lt; slide class=\u0026#34;my-style\u0026#34; \u0026gt;}} Custom CSS Example Letās make headers navy colored.\nCreate assets/css/reveal_custom.css with:\n.reveal section h1, .reveal section h2, .reveal section h3 { color: navy; } Questions? Ask\nDocumentation\n","date":1549324800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"0e6de1a61aa83269ff13324f3167c1a9","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/slides/example/","publishdate":"2019-02-05T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/slides/example/","section":"slides","summary":"An introduction to using Wowchemy's Slides feature.","tags":[],"title":"Slides","type":"slides"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour","Robert Ford"],"categories":null,"content":" Click the Cite button above to demo the feature to enable visitors to import publication metadata into their reference management software. Create your slides in Markdown - click the Slides button to check out the example. Add the publicationās full text or supplementary notes here. You can use rich formatting such as including code, math, and images.\n","date":1441065600,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"966884cc0d8ac9e31fab966c4534e973","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/publication/journal-article/","publishdate":"2017-01-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/publication/journal-article/","section":"publication","summary":"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis posuere tellus ac convallis placerat. Proin tincidunt magna sed ex sollicitudin condimentum.","tags":["Source Themes"],"title":"An example journal article","type":"publication"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour","Robert Ford"],"categories":null,"content":" Click the Cite button above to demo the feature to enable visitors to import publication metadata into their reference management software. Create your slides in Markdown - click the Slides button to check out the example. Add the publicationās full text or supplementary notes here. You can use rich formatting such as including code, math, and images.\n","date":1372636800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"69425fb10d4db090cfbd46854715582c","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/publication/conference-paper/","publishdate":"2017-01-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/publication/conference-paper/","section":"publication","summary":"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis posuere tellus ac convallis placerat. Proin tincidunt magna sed ex sollicitudin condimentum.","tags":[],"title":"An example conference paper","type":"publication"},{"authors":null,"categories":null,"content":"","date":-62135596800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"6d99026b9e19e4fa43d5aadf147c7176","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/contact/","publishdate":"0001-01-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/contact/","section":"","summary":"","tags":null,"title":"Contact Me","type":"landing"},{"authors":null,"categories":null,"content":"","date":-62135596800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1728764915,"objectID":"3d0a9b61d194120d73ece3fe86b621b5","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/sitemap/","publishdate":"0001-01-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/sitemap/","section":"","summary":"","tags":null,"title":"Sitemap","type":"landing"}]
\ No newline at end of file
+ [{"authors":null,"categories":null,"content":"","date":-62135596800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"section","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"2525497d367e79493fd32b198b28f040","permalink":"","publishdate":"0001-01-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"","section":"authors","summary":"","tags":null,"title":"Rohail Taimour","type":"authors"},{"authors":[],"categories":null,"content":" Click on the Slides button above to view the built-in slides feature. Slides can be added in a few ways:\nCreate slides using Wowchemyās Slides feature and link using slides parameter in the front matter of the talk file Upload an existing slide deck to static/ and link using url_slides parameter in the front matter of the talk file Embed your slides (e.g. Google Slides) or presentation video on this page using shortcodes. Further event details, including page elements such as image galleries, can be added to the body of this page.\n","date":1906549200,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"a8edef490afe42206247b6ac05657af0","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/event/example/","publishdate":"2017-01-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/event/example/","section":"event","summary":"An example talk using Wowchemy's Markdown slides feature.","tags":[],"title":"Example Talk","type":"event"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["musings"],"content":"Dig deeper if youāre hesitating Itās been a while since I wrote my last entry! Itās been a busy period with the adaptations needed in oneās life after they become new parents. Itās been challenging to say the least. However, writing new entries doesnāt take as much time once youāve put your mind to it. Which brings up the first question Iāve been pondering ever since I decided to write a blog: Is this platform a digital garden for me to test out new ideas or more a place for me to unleash and make sense of my inner world?\nThis blog entry is clearly one of the latter. And this is not a journal entry either, which would be rather more personal in nature. These entries stay on the web for the foreseeable future (unless I take them down myself).\nAnd the answer to the main thesis of this blog entry is ofcourse also: all of the above. This was one of the primary reasons I have categories for each of the main topics Iām planning to be writing on. So deciding to write on one topic does not at all preclude the other. That micro-decision, however, is where the issue begins. It presents the perfect opportunity to ruminate over getting certain details right that donāt really matter at all.\nI know that I certainly fall victim to this now and again. Iāve been thinking for sometime now to finish writing the series on the scraper. There remain a number of ideas remaining to tackle in that series and thereās a few lazy shortcuts I took Iāve been looking to rectify.\nThen on the other hand, I have the third part of the series on decoding myself. The values that Iāve chosen to base myself off, to guide me through life if you will, leave a lot of room for interpretation. Circumstances over the past few months, with the birth of our daughter, a change in job, the industry Iām working on, and Iāve even started having regular jam sessions with a band as a drummer. These are exciting times and have left me with a lot to reflect and ponder over.\nThis explains the stream of nature blog entry we have here because itās a reaffirmation of what this blog is ultimately about: mostly unfiltered expression.\nItās about showing up: make it happen! Most of my efforts so far have focused on setting up the website, learning the different pieces of the puzzle when it comes to statically generated websites. My goal was always to avoid spending too much time editing the content that I put out. The tools we have today allow us to run into loops editing things to our hearts desire. For example, I read somewhere that some of our favourite bands, when they recorded albums, would only get one take to record the whole thing due to technology constraints of the time. These kind of constraints mean that firstly, you need to have mastered your material to the point where you can do everything in one take and secondly, that some mistakes are bound to creep in. I think there was probably a far more tolerant view of these mistakes at the time.\nWhen it comes to my writing, I can be quite accepting of itās imperfections. That is, unless, Iām actually writing software. In the imperative paradigm of programming, where you have to give the computer complete instructions of what needs to be done, for the program to perform as expected, we need to provide sufficient instructions. Hence, these instructions require a certain amount of rigorousness, thinking of different edge cases: some of which you are only bound to find at runtime or when the users of the software use it in unexpected ways.\nI was hesitating to write because I have been inundated with a rush of new information, whether it was from technologies I was encountering in my recent role, or technical books I was reading at the moment. The book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, for example is a classic and has left me with a lot of food for thought. Itās fundamentally changed the way I look at any application I work on in the past. However, writing an article discussing it becomes more of a research endeavour, demanding a somewhat rigorous attitude. And hence, the procrastination.\nThe key takeaway here is that itās more important to show up, to write blog entries, whatever they may happen to be, than to curate the non-existent entries you will have on your website. Clearly I had projected this website to be more of a technical playground and was stuck to that idea instead of letting the entries come and for the website to organically grow as it will.\nThe tendency to go for over complicated solutions, or planning for solutions to problems that donāt exist yet is far too common. I see it all the time amongst developers, and I catch myself doing this far too often. I recently spotted this in a drumming context, where I saw how different playing in a band can be compared to practicing on your own. Since the past few months that Iāve been playing drums with a guitarist and bassist, itās increased my sense of musical awareness and forced me revisit some basics I had started to gloss over. Concretely speaking, ā¦","date":1709059766,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"ffe9a8dd64af79d10d3d751cf1718a25","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/analysis-paralysis/","publishdate":"2024-02-27T19:49:26+01:00","relpermalink":"/analysis-paralysis/","section":"post","summary":"Exploring how curated I want this blog to be. Is it a technical playground for me to test out ideas or a flowing stream of consciousness, i.e. musings.","tags":["self-reflection"],"title":"Falling Into Analysis Paralysis","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["drumming","musings"],"content":"Milestone unlocked: My first band Iām part of a few facebook groups where people post about looking for jam partners or asking for information about where thereād be live music playing in Brussels.\nI made a similar post in one of these groups asking for information about a place I can book a practice room that contains a drum kit. As you would have it, by a matter of pure luck, I got in touch with someone looking for a drummer. It seems he happened to see one of my post looking for a rehearsal room and decided to get in touch for a few projects he was part of.\nItād already been a while Iād been looking to play along with folks to get to that next level as a musician. Practicing and improving your techniques is something I really enjoy but at the end of the day, we play our preferred instruments to make Music. This was something my drum teacher always told me, that all technique and tools at our disposal ultimately are only meant to serve the Music.\nMoreover, there are certain aspects of playing music, which only come from playing with each other. There is an element of communication, improvisation and when these elements come together in a natural manner, thereās nothing thatās more satisfying.\nA new reason to practice, a different focus altogether! I would be the first to admit that I can get quite geeky about percussive instruments in general. For about 8 months I picked up the tabla, a percussive instrument prevalent in the musical tradition from the subcontinent. Thereās a few obvious reasons to be fascinated by the tabla. I grew up listening to the instrument and had a natural connection with the rhythmic tradition. Secondly, this is a percussive instrument that can be tuned in different pitches, making it sound like a melodic instrument in the hands of the right person. Go check out this video by the Maestro Zakir Hussain if you want to see that in action. However, whatās really the most amazing part of the tabla is that the tradition requires one to master the rhythm vocally before attempting to play it on the instrument.\nEach sound that tabla can make (and thereās a lot of them), has been assigned a vocal counterpart. This is a very rich concept can be adapted and applied to the drumset setting and leads to some very creative practice ideas!\nExplore vs Exploit: When to know you need to keep digging in deeper While itās been such a fantastic journey to learn about the Tabla, I eventually had to put it on pause because I saw I was spreading myself too thin. As a weekend warrior of sorts, when it comes to playing my instrument, you canāt let your limited number of practice hours be dispersed across different activities. You can, ofcourse, but there is a very hard tradeoff to be made here when youāre counting on seeing progress in your playing, as a way to stay motivated in your practice sessions.\nMaking that decision wasnāt easy. I have the impression human beings hesitate before committing to something. We want to keep our options open. Why? Maybe because itās easier to make mistakes as a beginner but more difficult to show up when you realize how much incremental effortās really needed to realise something. Taking the tabla as an example, I would have had to train my fingers to be able to articulate the notes properly. This is an exercise that develops slowly, as you develop the muscle memory over sustained and focused practice. I saw this from my own experience when I started playing the drums using the āOpen handedā style. In a nutshell, this style implies that a right handed player would need to develop their left, weaker, hand to lead on the instrument. It took me months and even a couple of years before I started to notice my left hand feeling on par, or at least in the same category, as my dominant right hand. Thereās a number of advantages to being able to play this way and having gone through the steep learning curve, I can now take advantage of a higher degree of ambidexterity on the drum kit. Had I been unable to commit to this approach at the start of my drumming journey, I wouldnāt have been able to meet this drumming milestone.\nHowever, while it is imperative spending time in the Exploit phase, honing in on skills slowly and steadily over time, you cannot ignore the Explore phase. Indeed, trying the tabla or even Open handed drumming when I first started was the result of the Explore phase. It was something that I decided to move into the Exploit phase once I decided committing to it.\nExplore periods can have a wider spectrum range than you might think At one point, I thought that this stage is about looking into big ideas. As seen in the figure below, that an Explore phase, necessarily entails a high amount of uncertainty. Iāve come to see this phase a bit differently more recently.\nI believe that we are constantly walking on the blurry line between Explore and Exploit. In digging deeper, in the Exploit phase, you start to notice more and more details, nuances, that were simply ā¦","date":1698940202,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"d7f4969e52868d149605b8b3f48353b5","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/post/2023-11-02-i-joined-a-band-as-a-drummer/","publishdate":"2023-11-02T16:50:02+01:00","relpermalink":"/post/2023-11-02-i-joined-a-band-as-a-drummer/","section":"post","summary":"Playing drums on your own is totally different from playing in a band","tags":[],"title":"I Joined a Band as a Drummer!","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["musings"],"content":"An article harder to write than expected When I first created this website, my primary goal was to create series articles: Write mostly technical content that needed exploring over a series of posts. This desire sprung from the large number of posts I had read online, which would introduce a topic at an introductory level and leave it at that. Oftentimes, I wanted something that went a bit deeper and far too often, google searches would amount to nothing in the end. Every once in a while, however, Iāve come across authors who took a more series oriented approach. Iāve benefitted immensely from such series, for example, while making this website. Hugo, the engine iām using to render this website from markdown content, didnāt ship with a very natural way to create series blog posts and I had to put something together for myself. Adding this functionality delayed my launch ( publishing my fist article) far longer than I care to admit (ahem, 6 months).\nWhy say this all anyway? Have we gone off topic when this article was about how to embed your prioritized values in your life? Well, yes and no. The short answer is, I wish there was this one golden tip, or even a few, that I could share with you, which would magically allow you to get clarity around your values and find ways to embed them in your day to day life. I certainly wish it was possible to be described within a thousand word article. I delayed \u0026amp; hesitated writing this article, hoping for an epiphany in the meantime, that Iād be able to share with you. This last point prevented me from writing more \u0026amp; eventually I broke through it with the article \u0026amp; here I revisited my motivations for even putting this blog together. I hope what Iāve come to learn is still worth sharing.\nValues are only words you breathe life into The first few years of COVID had been a time of real introspection for me. Iāve come that once youāve decided on a few values to live by, embedding them in your daily life still has some pre-requisites. Itās a process, which will be personal to you \u0026amp; which would evolve much as you evolve as a person. Wait a minute though-if weāre evolving as a person, then are our values also something that need to be revisited? If our reference, the values \u0026amp; our process to embed them, are both changing, then how do we make any sense of it all? In my experience, you do not need to revisit your values every fully moon cycle. You can, if you want. However, if you earnestly went through the process of defining them the first time, Iād leave it at that. This is because values in themselves have no meaning. They are only words. Itās your actions, what they mean to you and how you decide to live them that brings those words to life.\nAt a given point in time, you shortlisted āvaluesā from a list of 100. You made tradeoffs and assessed how you saw yourself. For example, loyalty, strength \u0026amp; patience. If you had to choose one of these, and I presume everyone would choose differently, can the choice of these words really change who we are? Does choosing strength mean loyalty becomes any less important? That I think patience is only for idiots? Of course not. Whatās important here is to take note of the mental process which led you to choose one value over another. Making that choice is critical to reduce the noise and to have a sense of direction. The tool weāve just achieved will help guide us when weāre in need of direction. When thereās a moment youāre faced with a tough decision and youāre able to water down that conundrum in terms of values that you feel are conflicting with each other.\nValues are like post-it notes Remember writing reminders on the palm of your hand for something youāre likely to forget? Maybe you didnāt need to do that like I used to as a kid, but the point is these values are little post-it notes for you to use for course correction. Anytime you hesitate \u0026amp; feel lost you can revisit the choice you made to be a certain version of yourself you had envisioned at a time of clarity. Another reason why itās not so important to get too attached to the value itself is that your interpretation of the value will keep changing as you move through life. Strength may mean something completely different to a youth in the prime of their life and an elder with decades of wisdom behind them. Your attachment to the word keeps deepening as you keep revisiting it, letting the words sink deeper \u0026amp; deeper into the palms of your hand.\nThe importance of having space in your life There is a crucial ingredient in making any of this work. You can choose your values, commit to them, but without having āspaceā in your life, you wonāt get too far. Iām talking about mental space where you can look inside yourself; be willing to make some decisions about who you aspire to be. It is critical that you understand and appreciate that these are choices YOU are making about yourself and that these choices are more important than many other choices we make in our day to day life. These ā¦","date":1698755184,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"37445a5ec76387cf6e0a9c9cf8c56855","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/personal-values-part-iii/","publishdate":"2023-10-31T13:26:24+01:00","relpermalink":"/personal-values-part-iii/","section":"post","summary":"Identifying your core values is just the beginning to living them.","tags":["self-reflection","personal growth","life lessons","core values"],"title":"Part III: Bringing your values into your daily life","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["musings"],"content":"Values exercise In my last article on the subject, I stressed the importance of having a set of values to inspire you to make the tough decisions. The toughest decisions for me often involved saying no. No to something cool I wanted to do, without first finishing something else I had started. Itās okay to change your mind about whatās important to you, as long as thatās not erratic.\nI received a lot of help in getting this clarify from Kris, who supported me in identifying and shortlisting the top most values I held dear. Naturally, this was an iterative process and I believe this is an exercise one can revisit multiple times since your values may slowly shift over time. Heading into this exercise, I had the following goals, in no particular order and non-exhaustive:\nBe super clear on the different roles I āidentifyā with Find ways of making āsustainableā progress on each of the identified roles above Cut out procrastination from my life so I can move forward with my identified priorities Refine my productivity systems to get the most out of them without overwhelming myself Having tools and systems I can fall back on to handle moments of anxiety and uncertainty Understand better what makes me tick and refine how I āchannelā my attention Learning to appreciate the moment as it is instead of trying to control it Find ways of channeling my creativity in ways that are healthy and donāt consume me Revisit some of the fundamental beliefs I held about myself and the world around me As can be seen, this wasnāt a short list of goals and I headed into my sessions with Kris with an open mind and heart. My one and only true goal was to come out of these sessions in a place where I was content with where I was.\nYour attention as a spider web Everyoneās likely had that moment when you are suddenly able to separate you, the one who notices, from the voice in your head. Oftentimes, it is a momentary experience and soon enough youāre back to being completely identified with that voice. That voice in your head, if allowed, can completely take over how you perceive reality. Through the process of self-reflection and writing a journal during certain crucial moments, I noticed how fickle your though process can be. Trying reading what you wrote ten days ago and how far removed you may feel from your own thoughts that felt all-encompassing the moment you were experiencing them. This was a revelation to me and to anyone interested in hearing someone describe these concepts can look upon The Artistās Way and The Untethered Soul.\nAs mentioned in The Untethered Soul, the voice in your head is like the annoying room mate that you canāt get rid of and you have to learn to live with. This voice has a tendency to create a spider web where the fundamental beliefs you hold about yourself would pull you in and trap you from being to see things for how they truly are.\nWhile this revelation already did wonders in how I began to deal with certain situations in my life, make sure to take the time to respond, rather than reacting. Making sure that my actions were grounded in the values I cherished rather than from a place of fear, insecurity, etc. Nevertheless, I will speak about three ideas in particular which made a huge difference in my life:\nAchieving goals may need you to make sacrifices The choosing is losing mindset. Better to keep my options āopenā āThe myth of the āperfect timeā for tackling big challengesā Sacrifices needed to achieve your goals Most of us desire better than what we have today - but what are you willing to give up to achieve those goals? This one was an eye opener for me when I saw how I could change my āvictimā mindset, where I was expecting things to be a certain way without really giving up something in return. Iām normally super vigilant about viewing myself as a āvictimā in a given situation. I think itās very natural for us to fall into that pattern since itās very convenient to shift responsibility to something external. This self-defense mechanism prevents us to feeling āless thanā since the reason weāre not where we want to be is not in our control.\nEverytime Iāve noticed this mindset, Iāve immediately resolved it by finding ways that I can either influence the situation using levers that are under my control and if the situation is truly outside my control altogether, to simply find ways to come to terms with the situation. Find a way to accept the situation as it is: stop fighting reality.\nIn my previous post in the series, I talked about the time I started waking up at 5 am in the morning to get consistent around my drumming. I started doing this because I began noticing the voice in my head making excuses for me about how ābusyā I am and how poor old me isnāt able to progress on their goals because there just isnāt enough time to prioritize drumming.\nPrioritizing things means making sacrifices and at that point in time, I started to question the number of hours I REALLY needed to be able to function well ā¦","date":1698337471,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"9dcb90c7c8f6dd71a8848ff8596bccf7","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/personal-values-part-ii/","publishdate":"2023-10-26T18:24:31+02:00","relpermalink":"/personal-values-part-ii/","section":"post","summary":"In this thought-provoking sequel to 'Decoding Rohail,' I explore the transformative power of identifying core values, making conscious choices, and overcoming procrastination. With insights from my own journey and references to influential books, this post serves as a comprehensive guide to self-reflection, personal growth, and life lessons.","tags":["self-reflection","personal growth","life lessons","core values","conscious choices","overcoming procrastination"],"title":"Part II: Unearthing Your True North","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["musings"],"content":"I came across this quote from the book āEssentialismā by Greg McKeown earlier this year which very nicely encapsulates some of the learnings and insights Iāve had over the period since COVID. The quote goes like this:\nSpace to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make\nBuying my first drum set I think the COVID period forced many of us to reconsider our routines and how we process everyday events. One of the best things that came out of COVID for me was to act on a childhood dream of mine - to learn to drum!\nI grew up in a house where we enjoyed listening to different types of Music. I can relate to Music in a way thatās helped me go cope with the challenges life throws at you. Listening to certain songs would transport you back in time to a certain moment in your life so Music holds transcendental qualities for me. While I certainly enjoyed air guitaring to some of my favourite guitar solos like Pink Floydās comfortably numb, Drumming is something that had an inexplicable allure for me. The raw energy and force that drumming is able to convey - the rhythmic elements of Music was something I naturally inlined towards. And on March 30th 2020, my life was forever changed.\nYamaha DTX 452 Drumming at 5 am in the morning Iām very glad I have an understanding wife and neighbours that didnāt complain about the thumping sound and vibrations from my bass pedal. With drumming, I suddenly had a whole new world open up to me. Youtube was my friend and I would take advantage of platforms like Drumeo to learn enough of the basics to get started. I had always been an avid music fan but Iād never learnt music theory and now suddenly, I realised that if I really wanted to make the most of online material in my learning journey, Iād need to learn how to read music. Thankfully, reading drum notation is rather straightforward compared to other instruments (or so I think). Things were all well and good until I realised one day:\nHow do I make the time to practice and reach the drumming goals Iād set for myself?\nIām quite a goal oriented person and so naturally I had set ambitious goals for myself. These goals were different from the ones Iād been setting for most of my life, which would often be related to studies or work. These were goals where I didnāt care as much if I went off track. They were more like a north star and had the ability to steer me back on course if I went too far astray.\nLo and behold, I saw that the best way for me to make the time to practice was to start waking up at 5 am in the morning. Yes. 5 am. I had tried practice at more reasonable times but it just wasnāt consistent. I had never thought thereād by anything that would make me jump out of bed this way. And now Iād found it. And I was jumping out of bed. During COVID. The drums helped me stay sane - though likely at the expense of my understanding wifeās sanity š¤£.\nI was experimenting with different material, playing along to songs I loved and even started learning to play open handed where instead of crossing your hands so your right (for most people, dominant) hand is on the hihat keeping time and you use your left hand on the snare. By playing open handed, as a right handed drummer, I was using my left hand to keep time, which meant I was using it on average 4 times more than my right hand. This was incredibly awkward and frustrating in the beginning. However, I stuck to it and configured my kit to suit this style of playing too:\nHi hat (left) setup incredibly low for open handed playing A typical practice session eventually came to be an hour or more of playing between 2-3 exercises, on a 15-20 minute break. Sound boring? I found it to be rather meditative actually. This setup was a result of a lot of self-reflection on what makes a good practice session. Benny Grebās Effective practicing for musicians had a lot of wisdom to share on the topic and much like Essentialism, the message was the same: Choosing is not losing. You need to make choices to go deeper and further on your topic of interest. This is especially true for something like drumming where there is more than an analytical understanding that you need to undertake to execute a particular pattern on the drums. You need to literally drill that pattern down into your body to the point where your muscle memory can take over and execute the pattern instinctively at will.\nComing to this realisation wasnāt easy. While itās great having all this information on our finger tips with platforms like youtube and social media but these platforms are also a constant reminder of the different wayās that youāre not enough where you are right now. We are constantly bombarded with what we donāt know, whatās cool and hip right now and 10 ways for you to {{ insert a hyped up skill here }}.\nFailing to choose is also a choice The learnings I had from drumming could be easily transferred to other areas of my ā¦","date":1698310245,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"1a5c4ab4717828b6b08a853e44b681db","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/personal-values-part-i/","publishdate":"2023-10-26T10:50:45+02:00","relpermalink":"/personal-values-part-i/","section":"post","summary":"In this edition of 'Decoding Rohail,' I delve into the transformative journey of self-discovery and personal growth spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. From buying my first drum set to reevaluating life priorities, this blog post explores how the quarantine period became a catalyst for meaningful change. Discover how I balanced the rhythm of drumming with the tempo of life, and what it taught me about setting personal values.","tags":["drums","COVID-19","self-reflection","personal growth","life lessons","productivity"],"title":"Part I: Quarantine Chronicles: How COVID-19 Helped me look inward","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["technology"],"content":"Motivation Remember that period when most parts of the world were in a lockdown due to COVID? Yes, weāre nearing the end of 2023 and COVID seems like a distant memory at this point. However, like I imagine many of us, I suddenly found that being restricted in movement and social interaction to a large extent, I had a lot more time at my disposal. This was also a time where my wife and I realised that we could have more space for ourselves so each of us could have an office setup we could be happy with. This also being a time of low interest rates to encourage consumption in the economy, it was an especially interesting property market.\nThis seemed as good a time as any to write a scraper for Belgiumās most popular property listings website: immoweb. My desire for this first version was to first, be able to have a very general idea of the Brussels property market. Thereafter, I would launch this script every few days to look at the new properties. The output of this script would be a CSV that Iād use to spot good deals and have all the relevant information Iād need to schedule visits.\nImplementing the Proof of concept I was running this script from a windows machine at the time and having done a scraping project once before already, knew that Iād start with selenium for the browser automation and parsing of the html. The setup required that I choose a browser and a corresponding geckodriver (with the appropriate version for your browser) to go along with it. Iāve used firefox and edge browsers (and their respective drivers) for different iterations of the scraper implementation.\nAfter messing around with developer tools, looking into the domās containing the information I was looking for using inspect, I had a script that was doing the job. I made a conda export of the environment I used for the scraping in case I ever needed to revisit this work again. This script did the job and I was quite happy leaving it at that with an environment export so I could pick up from this analysis when needed. This version of the script can be found here for those who are interested.\nA sidenote on Bayesian statistics For the longest time Iāve been a fan of Bayesian statistics. Being able to explicitly encode your modelling assumptions in the form of priors, as well as being very deliberate in reconstructing the data generating process of the phenomenon youāre modelling. You can visually verify how well your model is generalizing by doing what is called a posterior predictive check. The computational aspects of MCMC sampling also appeals to the nerd in me, while the convergence of your sampler gives indications about how well-informed a hypothesis you have for your data generating process. An ill-formulated model will simply not converge, unlike a number of other approaches which would always give a solution and then youāre left to figure out if youāre overfitting or underfitting. Then there is the fact that you are always able to work with distributions of your phenomenon of interest rather than relying solely on point estimates like we would in most other methods. Thereās a number of fascinating things that are possible with these posterior distributions, which include bayesian decision making. I will link to a great discussion on the subject by Thomas Wiecki on the subject here where we can see how to use our models to directly show the impact of uncertainty on real business metrics rather than arcane statistical metrics such as mean squared error, f1 score and the like which donāt hold any real business meaning.\nNaturally, I have my bias for these methods and using these models bring their own challenges. In some cases, traditional machine learning approaches would give better performance without sacrificing interpretability and help you reach a conclusion faster than using these bespoke modelling approaches. Nonetheless, I was on the lookout for an opportunity to find a dataset where I could exploit the natural hierarchical structure of data in a hierarchical modelling or the flexibility of Gaussian process modelling to capture the intricaties of non-linear processes. The link shows the distinction between modelling the same problem as a regression vs using a gaussian process smoothing model.\nRevisiting the implementation once again Any data scientist or machine learning practitioner will tell you about their struggles with data. Itās either data quality (or lack thereof) or just the lack of data itself for performing interesting analyses. Then it suddenly occurred to me: property data is perfect for the experiments I wanted to conduct.\nScraping property prices over time gives the opportunity to model property prices over time and ask interesting questions, including, but not limited to the following:\nAre rental property prices growing at the same rate as purchase properties? Do we observe a similar growth rate across different communes? Are properties in the same commune priced similarly and if so, how much does this ā¦","date":1698156840,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"5b49bc16d699569b9faaa7c1093cee21","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/a-scraper-that-scales-part-i/","publishdate":"2023-10-24T16:14:00+02:00","relpermalink":"/a-scraper-that-scales-part-i/","section":"post","summary":"Explore the journey of building a robust web scraper for analyzing Belgium's property market. Learn how we transitioned from Selenium to Beautiful Soup for efficiency, used Poetry and Typer for better dependency management, amongst other tools. This blog is part one of a series aimed at creating a scalable data collection and analysis tool","tags":["python","web-scraping"],"title":"Part I: The Motivation to Build a Scraper in Python","type":"post"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":["musings"],"content":"Exciting News: My Website is Live! š\nHello everyone, and welcome to www.rohailtaimour.com! I am incredibly excited to announce that my website is officially live. š\nBuilt it Myself with Hugo š ļø\nIn the tech world, there are countless ways to build a website, many of which offer quick and easy solutions. However, I chose to take a different route by building this website myself using Hugo. The journey was challenging but immensely rewarding, providing me with hands-on experience that goes beyond just writing code.\nHosted on GitHub Pages with GitHub Actions š\nOne of the most enlightening aspects of this project was learning how to host a static website using GitHub Pages and automating the deployment process with GitHub Actions. Surprisingly, this was not as daunting as it sounds, and I found the experience to be relatively straightforward. Keep an eye out for a future blog post where Iāll document this process in detail!\nCustomized to My Needs šØ\nThe journey didnāt stop at just building the website; Iāve also customized it to suit my preferences and needs. This involved tweaking the template to accommodate blog series, implementing a contact form, and even adding the ability for visitors to comment on blog posts. One challenge still ahead is optimizing the website for SEOāturns out my MySpace account is incredibly resilient in search rankings!\nWhatās Coming Up š\nThis website will serve as my digital canvas. Iāll use it to share my insights and experiences on a range of topics: from Python development, machine learning, and data engineering, to open-source technology frameworks and beyond.\nYour Feedback is Welcome š\nFeel free to explore the website and let me know what you think. Your feedback is invaluable and will help me continue to improve this digital space.\nThank you for visiting, and stay tuned for exciting content!\nš www.rohailtaimour.com\n","date":1697500800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"d82060c7e468c61c4075a1ad9b4f47b8","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/post/20231017-hello-world/","publishdate":"2023-10-17T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/post/20231017-hello-world/","section":"post","summary":"Rohail Taimour's blog!","tags":null,"title":"Welcome to my Website! š","type":"post"},{"authors":null,"categories":null,"content":"- block: collection id: talks content: title: Recent \u0026amp; Upcoming Talks filters: folders: - event design: columns: ā2ā view: compact # - block: portfolio # id: projects # content: # title: Projects # filters: # folders: # - project # # Default filter index (e.g. 0 corresponds to the first filter_button instance below). # default_button_index: 0 # # Filter toolbar (optional). # # Add or remove as many filters (filter_button instances) as you like. # # To show all items, set tag to ā*ā. # # To filter by a specific tag, set tag to an existing tag name. # # To remove the toolbar, delete the entire filter_button block. # buttons: # - name: All # tag: ā*ā # - name: Deep Learning # tag: Deep Learning # - name: Other # tag: Demo # design: # # Choose how many columns the section has. Valid values: ā1ā or ā2ā. # columns: ā1ā # view: showcase # # For Showcase view, flip alternate rows? # flip_alt_rows: false ","date":1696896000,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"bb238c2d1697da0a6715e7e8c8299cef","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/project/","publishdate":"2023-10-10T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/project/","section":"","summary":"- block: collection id: talks content: title: Recent \u0026 Upcoming Talks filters: folders: - event design: columns: ā2ā view: compact # - block: portfolio # id: projects # content: # title: Projects # filters: # folders: # - project # # Default filter index (e.","tags":null,"title":"","type":"landing"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour"],"categories":null,"content":" Create your slides in Markdown - click the Slides button to check out the example. Add the publicationās full text or supplementary notes here. 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Ask\nDocumentation\n","date":1549324800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"0e6de1a61aa83269ff13324f3167c1a9","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/slides/example/","publishdate":"2019-02-05T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/slides/example/","section":"slides","summary":"An introduction to using Wowchemy's Slides feature.","tags":[],"title":"Slides","type":"slides"},{"authors":["Rohail Taimour","Robert Ford"],"categories":null,"content":" Click the Cite button above to demo the feature to enable visitors to import publication metadata into their reference management software. Create your slides in Markdown - click the Slides button to check out the example. Add the publicationās full text or supplementary notes here. 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You can use rich formatting such as including code, math, and images.\n","date":1372636800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1730094592,"objectID":"69425fb10d4db090cfbd46854715582c","permalink":"https://www.rohailtaimour.com/publication/conference-paper/","publishdate":"2017-01-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/publication/conference-paper/","section":"publication","summary":"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis posuere tellus ac convallis placerat. 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Part I: Quarantine Chronicles: How COVID-19 Helped me look inward