A short story of internet friends.
I wanna tell a short story.
This is Eder. I could not find a better picture of him.
I met Eder when I was 19 — on a Github issue lol
The repo was an open-source Keras implementation of YoloV3 I was trying to get working. I was trying to train my own object detection model to try to build my own self-driving car and was getting destroyed by Tensorflow errors (it was 2015/2016 and there was no APIs haha).
So, I did some digging.
I found this guy named “Eder” on the repo who seemed pretty smart, he was answering a bunch of questions, I found his email, and emailed him screenshots of my errors.
He…replied.
I was amazed. He immediately fixed my issues.
And then he replied again.
And again.
Then we hopped on a call.
And he taught me about neural networks and answered some extremely niche questions on different loss functions.
Eder ended up being my first real mentor.
I would often ask him why he was helping me so much, and I’ll never forget he said “Because someone else did the same for me at one point”.
At the time, Eder was a 27 year-old Ph.D student who recently graduated and went to work at CommaAI in San Francisco with George Hotz.
“Wow. California”, I thought.
It felt so far. I was just a kid in Florida.
The idea of going from Florida to California felt insane. America is huge. And, rarely do people end up permanently leaving their state unless its for a little vacation. I thought I would die in Florida.
San Francisco felt insane.
That was Apple, Google, Silicon Valley, all the big dogs.
I felt so blessed to even talk to this guy on the phone and he inspired me tons.
When I talked to Eder — he felt like the first person I ever talked that liked making stuff. Up to that point in my life, I had just made stuff by myself always.
One day on our call, Eder says “Bro you should come to SF and say hi”.
And guess what.
I did.
I was 19. I didn’t even know what a startup was.
I barely knew where SF was on a map.
I just got into coding like a year before.
I had no idea what I’d do there.
But, I found a way for my school to fund my ticket + hotel as a “research trip” and on that trip I got to meet Eder, see SF for the first time, and got to see what a fancy startup HQ like CommaAI looked like — surprise, surprise it was just a giant 3-floor house where everyone was living, working, and breathing self-driving cars.
I had never seen anything like it.
The only office I ever knew was like the corporate ones back home.
This was insane.
I loved it.
And from there, I knew what I wanted to do.
I wanted to be here.
Doing stuff.
With people like Eder.
After that little trip to Eder I decided I’d be back. And, two-years later I moved from Orlando to SF without telling my parents (my father was not happy).
And, it was awesome.
It’s been a journey since.
I’ll always thank Eder for inspiring me to come out, and showing me what was out there.
I felt really alone and weird in Florida.
But, thanks to the power of the internet — I met someone that I felt similar to for the first time. Turns out, like-minded people really are just a few messages away.
One more thing.
I’ll never forget during one of our first calls I was pummeling him with questions — and he said, “I’ll tell you everything I know. But, you have to promise you’ll pass on the knowledge to someone else one day”.
I promised.
And that spawned an entire career of me writing viral blog posts about how I trained models that got millions of views, even a YT channel where I taught people to code.
A lot of people asked me why I did these things…
Yes, a big reason was because I enjoyed it.
But, a bigger reason?
Because I had made a promise to Eder — that, when someone taught me something, I would teach it to someone else.
I’m glad I made that promise.
It brought me places in these last 10-years I never expected…
It’s a promise I keep to this day.
Here’s me and Eder last week:
NEW YT VIDEO WOOOOOOO.
High chance you already saw it, but, the new YT video is out.
Shot + edited by Bonzo. Really proud of it.
It’s an 8-minute short film about how I’ve been navigating the idea maze.
This was a tough video. For weeks I had no idea what this month’s video would even be about. I wanted to tell the world about by frustrations and anxieties, my highs and lows.…but didn’t know how to word it.
But one morning, it all hit me, and I wrote the script in one 30-minute session.
Compared to the last video, this one was more complex in terms of scenes — the script itself had 20+ different scenes and 3-4 different locations.
To keep things efficient, me and Bonzo planned out all the shots the day before.
Then the next day we shot the video from 10AM - 5PM straight.
Bonzo speed ran the edit in just a day.
From there, Dante helped me with some thumbnails.
Making thumbnails is enough to make any man go crazy and just takes a ton of inspiration + work.
YouTube has the option where it will auto-test test 3 different thumbnails for 14 days.
Here’s the winner from the last video:
And, here’s the thumbnail winning right now for new video.
This one Dante made for me. The “+ ai” is genius.
Okay, thats all see u soon byeeeeeeeee.
P.S: I GOT A NEW POSTER. IT’S AN ORIGINAL: