Restarting the Site
I shut Neural Market Trends down on the last day of August thinking it was going to be for good. Things have changed on my end and I’m thinking of restarting this site. I’m thinking of moving back to my roots and building a community.
Why? Because of something I saw a few days ago.
I was on a work call the other day and a prospect was sharing his screen. I noticed he had a bookmark to the popular HackerNoon site.
There’s nothing wrong with being a fan of HackerNoon, I’m one of them as well, but the fact they were using that site to get insight into the very complex world of Machine Learning, Data Science, and AI was fascinating.
This very blog started with the express purpose of helping people learn RapidMiner, a Data Science platform. Yes, it was to learn how to trade the stock market with AI, but my tutorials have helped 1000’s people.
That was always my express goal with this site, to help people and I think I deviated away from that mission over the past few years.
The biggest takeaway was from this test was that nobody cared.
I started writing about different topics that were not related to Data Science, Machine Learning, or AI. Things like SEO and passive investing. I learned a helluva lot from those two topics but my long-time readers came here to learn from tutorials and have their finger on the “AI pulse” of things.
I stopped writing on those topics because I ended up working in the field. I still love what I do every single day but I got tired from writing about it.
“we’re not planting a tree, we’re raising a forest.”
That seems to be the curse, once you do something you love and earn money from it you really start to burn out from it.
Then, about a month ago I made a test here. I ported the blog over to the Ghost CMS. I successfully achieved the port after many long hours BUT I had severe issues in getting everything running correctly.
While partially successful I reverted back to a Hugo-based blog hosted on AWS.
The biggest takeaway was from this test was that nobody cared. My community has for the most part left, the people I helped are now being helped by others.
First off, I’m glad they’re being helped by others. They’re being helped by the TowardsDataScience and HackerNoon publications. I’ve seen how wildly successful those writers have become and they did it by sharing their knowledge.
That realization coupled with the call I had hit me like a ton of bricks and it re-inspired me.
The Way Forward
What now? That’s a most interesting question that I’m thinking about it a lot.
I think first and foremost I want to get back to my roots, back to Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI.
Second, I think I want to build a new community and continue to share knowledge, not just mine but those who decided to come on this journey (later).
In order to do that I will need to make some structural changes to the backbone of how I’m running things. Hugo won’t cut it anymore, things will need to become dynamic.
I thought back to what Sri Ambati CEO of H2O said (paraphrased), “we’re not planting a tree, we’re raising a forest.” Those words keep echoing in my head ever since I heard them for the first time in 2018.
This means I plan to start posting again. I’m going to plant seedlings and raise a forest. I have a lot more tutorials and other knowledge to share from working in this field now for over 7 years.
In other words, stay tuned, a new forest is being planted.