Machine Learning Project Series: Building a Personal Knowledge Management System - Part 0 - Introduction and Purpose
Tags: machinelearning, sideprojects, programming, learning
Published: 2020-03-05 18:50:02

_This article was originally published at [https://programmerbackpack.com](https://programmerbackpack.com "https://programmerbackpack.com")._

_Interested in more stories like this? Follow me on Twitter at [@b_dmarius](https://twitter.com/b_dmarius "https://twitter.com/b_dmarius") and I'll post there every new article._

## Introduction and purpose - starting a new journey

If you're like me, you're passionate about **Technology**, **Machine Learning** and **Programming** in general and you feel that everyday there's something new to learn. You follow other blogs, you read articles and forums, you watch videos about people building cool stuff. And you want to build your own cool applications that you can share with the world.

If you're even *more* like me, you feel that the tech field is changing so much and so fast that trying to keep pace becomes overwhelming and at times rather discouraging. Everything looks cool, interesting and sufficiently difficult that your mind says: I wanna learn this too! I am talking back-end, front-end, Cloud, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Data Science, you name it, you want to learn it all!

Finally, you remember you're a programmer, and the only good way you know for learning something is actually *building* something. And that is what I want to do now.

I am starting a journey of deepening my knowledge on Machine Learning, Deep Learning and NLP. And I know that reading thousands of articles without actually building something will only get me so far. So I am changing the way I look at the game.

## The Project

I want to build a tool that will help me keep track of what I learn everyday. Not just a notes app, but something which will help me remember and retrieve the information I saved in a more efficient way. Something to help me make connections faster between a thing I learned today and that thing I learned 2 years ago that I almost forgot.

And equally important, a tool that is not standing in my way when I want to save a piece of information, but one that allows me to do that fast and in an efficient manner.

It will be something based on Machine Learning stuff for sure. I promised to myself not to overkill it and to introduce only useful features, that I will really enjoy. If it's solvable by ML, then it's a plus, because it also serves my purpose of learning. Otherwise, go with other methods because having features just for the sake of having them will not help me in any way.

Most important of all, I want to learn lots of new things while working on this. I will take every small lesson one at a time, apply it to my project and also share it on this blog, maybe someone else also needs it.

## The Plan

While working on this tool I will most definitely learn new things that I'll find interesting and so I will post them here. If I can demo it by something implemented in the application, I'll sure do. If not, I'll find other useful and relevant examples, because, as I said earlier, we as programmers learn by doing. 

Just like with my other articles, I'll also share code snippets on [Github](https://github.com/bdmarius "https://programmerbackpack.com"). All my progress will be documented here and on Twitter at [@b_dmarius](https://twitter.com/b_dmarius "https://twitter.com/b_dmarius"). 

## Questions still left open

**What kind of app is it going to be?**

As I said, I still don't have the full picture. I'll share it as soon as I have it. It might me a mobile app, or a browser extension, or a web app. Whichever I feel will serve me better. I started this project with the idea that this is built primarily for myself.

**What technologies are you going to use?**

I can just copy-paste the answer from above, but you have it right there! 😃

**How often are you going to post?**

This is not going to be a regular series. I'll post only whenever I feel like I have something new to show. But I'll post updates as often as possible.

**Can I contribute?**

Please let me know if you want to contribute to a project like this. If I find enough interest for this, I'll take it open source and we can all work together.

I think this is all for the moment. I'll come up with updates and new ideas as soon as I can. Thank you so much if you decide joining me on this journey. It will be a pleasure to share my progress!


_Thank you so much for reading this article. Interested in more? Follow me on Twitter at [@b_dmarius](https://twitter.com/b_dmarius "https://twitter.com/b_dmarius") and I'll post there every new article._