HomeAuthor InterviewsInterview with Jaejun (Brandon) Lee

Interview with Jaejun (Brandon) Lee

Jaejun (Brandon) Lee is the author of Production-Ready Applied Deep Learning; we got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.

Q: What are your specialist tech areas?
Jaejun : Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, Deep Learning.

Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Jaejun: Everything started from a Tomasz’s message. He randomly asked me if I want to write a book. I thought it was a joke so I asked if he was being serious. He said he was serious and shared what he wanted to cover in this book. Since I always wanted to become an author one day, I straight up said yes, and here I am.

Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Jaejun: We spent about an year to complete this book. Since each author has a different expertise, we were able to cover wide range of topic closing the loop of AI application development. Throughout the journey, we tried our best to stay on top of the latest concepts and technologies so that the contents of our book are up to date.

Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Jaejun: We had a hard time meeting the due dates as all of us were working full-time. To keep things moving forward, we met every Tuesday and reminded each other’s responsibility.

Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Jaejun: The book is designed to help everyone working in AI domain. For those who focus on developing deep learning model, they will understand the process of model deployment. For those who are responsible for deploying the model at scale, they will learn how deep learning works and how to build an effective model.

Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Jaejun: While there exist many books on deep learning models, it is rather difficult to find a book about serving the models at scale. On the other hand, our book explains every step of AI application development and deployment in detail. Throughout the book, readers will learn common problems people encounter during the model deployment and how to overcome the difficulties.

Q: What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away with from the book?
Jaejun: Many people working on AI still find model deployment difficult. Internet has been the go-to place for the issues but finding the right resource can be time consuming as there are way too many. With the wide range of topics and thoroughly explained contnets, I believe our book can be the first resource people can pick up for solving the problem at hand.

Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Jaejun: Even though we assumed the readers have minimal understanding of AI, it’d be beneficial to have some knowledge in software engineering. Therefore, we recommend the readers to pick up software engineering basics before opening this book.

Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Jaejun: The official documentations of PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be the saviors in most cases. If anyone wants to learn other details that our book does not cover, these resources should be able to guide to the right direction.

Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Jaejun:
It was fascinating! They are continuously improving their platform to help writers to focus on putting their ideas together for a book.

Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Jaejun:
We had a meeting for every chapter. During the meeting, we outlined what we should cover in the chapter, organized the sections in a way that the contents flow the best for readers, and filled in each section. Once we have an initial version, all of us went through the chapter over and over making sure the chapter contains the right contents.

Q. What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Jaejun:
I think writing a book in a group is quite different from writing a book alone. The plans were changing often due to various reasons that I wasn’t aware of. When setting up deadlines, the group needs to consider what each one has on their plate. It is also important to keep each other updated with their progress regularly.

You can find Jaejun’s book on Amazon by following this link : Please click here

Production-Ready Applied Deep Learning- Available on Amazon