New Year

Last year was full of ups and downs and I can honestly say that I am a changed man.

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You feel you’ve been rehabilitated?

Red: Yes, sir. Absolutely. I’ve learned my lesson. I can honestly say I’m a changed man. I’m no longer a danger to society. That’s the God’s honest truth. No doubt about it.

I have burnt a lot of bridges this year and created a few. I have no regrets. One of the highlights of 2013 has been getting selected for http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013. I had worked a lot to get selected and my acads suffered a lot because of that. The whole affair proved to me that you could probably do anything given time if you genuinely want to do it. I was also disappointed a bit with the whole affair as I found myself losing interest after sometime. I can’t blame anything for it except my short attention span. In the end I barely scraped through. Again I did manage to learn a lot of stuff like python packaging, writing documentation and some related stuff.

I have tried to learn at least half a dozen distinct languages this year and picked up a lot of things. The lack of mastery is the only thing that worries me. I have made it to point to focus on making things rather than learning stuff from now on. Let’s seen how that pans out.

Another important change this year has been, switching to Emacs. One thing I have noticed is how Emacs encourages it’s users to look under that hood and hack stuff. I you don’t understand a particular key binding or function just hit C-h k or C-h f and you will get the docs with a link to the source. I am sure this philosophy of everything is hackable will flow into the users day to day work flow.

Also I managed to read a few books last year. I certainly plan to increase my book consumption the coming year. Last year was pretty disappointing with respect to TV. Breaking Bad and Homeland were the only exceptions. Person of interest shown in intervals and that was enough to keep me coming back every week though the lack of alternatives must have been the main reason.

This year I had signed up for a number of MOOCs and only managed to complete one. The one I managed to complete was BerkleyX’s SaSS 1. It’s a pretty challenging course If you haven’t done any rails before.I learned a lot. I had signed up for the Scala course by Martin Oderski, the programming languages course in Coursera, Andrew NG’s ML course, history of rock course on coursera, Georgia Tech’s Computational Finance and a few others. I had left them due to the lack of time. Come to think of it I could have completed a couple if I had concentrated my efforts. One more thing to change.

This year also saw Real Madrid and Arsenal both not winning anything. Hope both do well this year.

So apart from the usual resolutions, the ones I hope to keep are

  • read more.
  • code more.
  • complete some MOOCs(I have already signed up for a few)
  • contribute more to open-source.
  • master something.