My year in review

Tomorrow, the 5th of April 2024, I turn a year older. While this post is obviously intended to get me as many birthday wishes as possible, I wanted to share what an incredible year of personal struggle and glory it has been. If I could re-live all of last year once again, I'd do absolutely nothing differently. Here are 5 things I am proud of.

The protruded disc

I have had an annoying lower back problem for several years now. It'd get worse and get better on its on. It wasn't anything more than a mild nuisance. The orthopedists I consulted several times said to me that lower-back pain is one of the most common problems around and it could be because of any number of things. I was asked to just live with it. And so I did.

At the beginning of 2023, I suffered an injury at the gym doing ego-lifts which unbeknownst to me totally messed up my lower back. Right and proper. Over the following weeks, I could barely walk - No more than 10 minutes at a time. I had this pain radiating down my right leg. The physiotherapist I consulted immediately asked me to go away and see an orthopaedic surgeon. We got an MRI scan done and found out that the L5-S1 disc was extruded. See that yellow box in the image below, that is the L5-S1. The surgeon showed me the other discs above, all looking pristine, sitting nicely inside the vertebrae of the spine, and said "We have to get it operated". If there is one thing I am terrified of, it is needles! And I wasn't going to let someone lay me down, make a hole in my back and scrape stuff off. Nope, not gonna happen. I was determined to try more natural healing techniques.

Meanwhile, things became worse. I started experiencing a numbing pain down both my legs, tingling sensations, pins and needles - All signs of what could potentially be Cauda equina syndrome(read as something not very nice). I had to rush in to the emergency thrice, each time the NHS sending me away saying, it is not too late yet, come back when it is too late :)

The pain meanwhile just did not go away. The surgeon suggested getting a CT guided steroid injection which would numb the pain for a month or two and allow me to think - which really really helped. The steroid injection made the pain disappear overnight, while the underlying problem didn't - Gave me much needed space and time to think. What did I want to do?

I'd decided that I wasn't going to get a surgery - I was and am still terrified of needles. Over the following months and the rest of last year, I read every single book about healing this naturally. I combed through every single Reddit thread on how people with similar issues were dealing with it. I came up with a program that I'd stick to - from physiotherapy, core exercises, heat compression, to how I pick things up from the floor and what position I'd sleep in. The result? Here it is.

The disc is now starting to reabsorb itself! The image on the right shows this. I can walk for as long as I want now. I can go back to the gym. I still have to be conscious on how I go about things, how I pick stuff up from the floor etc. But this is my new reality! And I am used to it.

Learnt to swim!

I know, I know, a grown man who didn't know how to swim up until 6 months ago? Crazy. But this has been on my list of things to learn for a looonggg time . Look at me go now!

Built Ask Polly

In November of last year, in the internal Medallia hackathon, the intelligent question answering chatbot I built, called Ask Polly, won the prize. Today, with a lot of help and support from a lot of forward thinkers from within the business, Ask Polly has been made available to users in Medallia as an internal facing chatbot - On Slack! Polly is powered by a Large Language Model and faithfully answers questions based on what she knows and even retrieves Google slides based on what she sees.

Personally, I have turned a corner in my learning journey with Polly. Over the last several years I have been diligently learning Python, Machine Learning and AI. I learnt the math, I learnt the algorithms, I learnt the ML libraries. Bringing them all to life with Polly, and empowering users with a tool like Polly is one of the most gratifying journeys I have ever had.

Polly also gave me the opportunity to connect with over 50 different people within the business, take their point of views, advice and suggestions. This has been nothing short of an incredibly rich experience for me and I am ever so grateful.

Got through the Stanford AI professional program

About 9 months, 600 hours of effort, every single weekend was about getting through the Stanford AI professional program. While the academic learning set me up very nicely to put to practice what I learnt, what I will remember the most is the opportunity to interact with very intelligent people from across the industry. I am grateful to my family who gave me the time and the space I needed to carry on doing what I wanted to do.

Hit my quota, all of it.

Last year, I had the opportunity to work with some stellar team mates, sales directors and leaders in Medallia, with all of whose help I made 105% of target. I thoroughly enjoyed working with my customers, people from some of the biggest everyday brands, helping them see the value of a state of the art technology platform. While hitting the numbers is what pays the bills, it is the time I spent working with these people that I have cherished the most.

And that's it. I look forward to another glorious year of personal struggle, learning and most of all, living every single day!