I continue to spend most of my free energy learning Finnish. Only a few more years and I should be able to finally focus on my career again :')
Two new projects of note this month, one specific to Finnish language learners, and one that is probably useful for language learners in general:
* https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/tsk - A Finnish pocket dictionary with a TUI interface. This is the first nontrivial thing I've built in Go, by which I meant I had to implement and tweak a randomly pruning trie by hand to get the performance characteristics I wanted (it wasn't actually that bad). I chose Go mostly because of the fantastic cross-compilation story.
* https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki - This Python program wraps around `yt-dlp` and `whisper` to create Anki decks for listening practice. This should work for any (monolingual) video in any language. There are many such projects on GitHub, I'm aware, but it was surprisingly hard to find any that actually wrapped around Whisper instead of needing an SRT, VTT, etc file to come from somewhere else. In that sense mine is a "one command" solution - just provide the YouTube link and go. It does not provide a translation for those subtitles yet; in keeping with the all-in-one approach, I'm thinking I might wrap around LLaMa 3 to let the user specify that we should also --translate-to {en,es,eo, etc} if desired. For now my reading skills are advanced enough that I don't need that.
I relocated permanently back in 2021, in fact, soon after finishing up undergrad at Northwestern. I'm a dual US/EU citizen and I moved to be with my Finnish wife. I'm here now!
I don't have a blog post to share. My experience here has been largely positive, modulo the obvious financial caveat: My take home salary really is about ~30% of what it would be had I stayed back in the United States and followed a similar career trajectory. In the long run I think this is an eminently fixable problem, however :)
Two new projects of note this month, one specific to Finnish language learners, and one that is probably useful for language learners in general:
* https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/tsk - A Finnish pocket dictionary with a TUI interface. This is the first nontrivial thing I've built in Go, by which I meant I had to implement and tweak a randomly pruning trie by hand to get the performance characteristics I wanted (it wasn't actually that bad). I chose Go mostly because of the fantastic cross-compilation story.
* https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki - This Python program wraps around `yt-dlp` and `whisper` to create Anki decks for listening practice. This should work for any (monolingual) video in any language. There are many such projects on GitHub, I'm aware, but it was surprisingly hard to find any that actually wrapped around Whisper instead of needing an SRT, VTT, etc file to come from somewhere else. In that sense mine is a "one command" solution - just provide the YouTube link and go. It does not provide a translation for those subtitles yet; in keeping with the all-in-one approach, I'm thinking I might wrap around LLaMa 3 to let the user specify that we should also --translate-to {en,es,eo, etc} if desired. For now my reading skills are advanced enough that I don't need that.