New Year
31 Dec 2011It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this blog, and a completely crazy past few months, so I hope to rectify the former by using the latter as the basis for this post :)
I turned 30 this September, and the force of switching from the deferring-friendly 20’s (‘I can achieve these things, don’t worry, I’m still young’) to the ‘oh shit I’m an adult now’ 30’s has hit harder than I expected (in fact, to be honest, I didn’t expect it at all).
So what’s happened? Well in my personal life, I finally did something about my weight issue and lost ~3.5 stone (~50lb, ~23kg).
In my intellectual/geek life I committed to the open Stanford AI course and completed it with a 98.7% average*, and wrote notes for the purposes of actual applying the course to real things (the notes are not yet fully complete, however I do plan to finish that later), which has really helped with my recently very low intellectual confidence.
Two fundamental things have changed - firstly I’ve got organised about things (for weight loss - food diary, for study - committed, realistic work schedule), secondly and far more importantly, I’ve stopped beating myself up quite as badly about everything. Beating yourself up like that makes you incapable of doing anything since you feel constantly bad about whatever it is you’re doing, and thus reticent to do it, which means you don’t improve/change anything, which means you beat yourself up more, etc. - a vicious, vicious cycle.
Another thing to note here is the amazing usefulness of timeboxing. The past week I have got more hacking done in a week than I have for hundreds of weeks prior.
So what about resolutions? Over the coming year I plan to contribute considerably more to go, and build weak into a fully-fledged chess engine (though I can make no guarantees to its eventual strength) and I intend to work on improving my algorithmic and computer science fundamentals knowledge. On the final bit - I plan to enter the google code jam and blog about the experience, though I don’t expect or predict any sort of performance, it’s more of a motivation and point of focus.
Happy New Year!
* I’m not boasting here. I fell considerably below the performance of many other participants and wish I’d been more careful with many of the answers. Also I realised how rusty I am at this stuff. Also I couldn’t stand to carry on attending the meetup I was attending given how erudite, intelligent and informed the other people were compared to me.