change

June 20, 2017

Trying to change my habits in a way it feels fun!

How I wish to change my life?

The past week had been pretty busy. To accompany this line, I would also like to say that I feel like I spend way too much time on my laptop (feeling busy) but not getting too much done correspondingly! :-(

I want a change

It’s time now — I am not gonna let this cut down my productivity, I will have to learn time management, and to make sure that this happens, I am gonna experiment some major changes in my routine.

Getting back to books again

I have started listening to the book: Happiness of Pursuit

Recently, an article from Max Deutsch caught my eye — (How to build a self driving car in one month) — which lead me to follow most of his work and to this book. This guy amazes me in every way possible — He reads books (a lot). He blogs (a lot) in a lot detail about everything he does. He cycles. He programs. He follows his passion [a lot**.

I also have gotten the book: Peak — Secrets from the new Science of Expertise. It’s in my listening list as well.

Learning

Learning how to learn  Started this course - I always wanted to do this course, but never found time for this. It’s amongst my top priorities now.

Documenting

Blogging - It helps me to introspect my activities, so I will be changing my blogging habits, though I want to achieve one blog/day,I will be aiming at one blog every 2 days for now. Also, inspired by Max Deutsch! I find his blog to be an unending source of knowledge, practical experience and inspiration. Thank You Max Deutsch

Challenging my limits - I will take M2M (Month to Master) challenge this year. According to Max, M2M is:

I will spend the next year trying to master twelve expert-level skills — devoting one month to each skill and writing daily about the process.

I’m calling the project Month to Master (M2M). I haven’t thought of challenges as per, but you will most likely hear about it my next post.

Past days

Now, coming back to past days — the reason~s~ behind these developments: my to-do list had been accumulating ever since starting of this month. It feels like I don’t have enough time, but now, when I think of it - I have had enough time! Everything I had in there fell more or less in one of the following topics:

Running StackGen

Reference: https://github.com/hanzhanggit/StackGAN

A neural network which converts text -> images. You just need to write the description and you would have an image prepared. How cool is that!!

One of my seniors showed me their video, since then, I was tempted to make this thing work on my machine and see by myself. I spent nearly 6 hours trying to make it work in every possible way, but since my computer doesn’t have a NVIDIA chip, it won’t run CUDA and hence this didn’t run. But still, I learned many things in the process. :-)

coala

Getting back on coala Reference: https://coala.io

I am selected with coala for Google Summer of Code 2017. Though, I am keeping up with my schedule, I have some PR’s which were abandoned since I had been busy with exams and then, other stuff. I stated working on one of them, and man, rebasing it was quite hard, especially when one tries to rebase coala with a remote upstream pointing towards coala-bears ;) — Since, I was getting a lot of conflicts, I even wrote a script for skipping patches ;P. I noticed the mistake after digging for 30 mins. That was one hell of a facepalm moment.

Hacking on vulture

https://github.com/jendrikseipp/vulture

I have some issues pending, but I am pretty sure I can catch up on them. I have had already done a pretty good amount of research.

todoman

Configuring todoman - https://github.com/pimutils/todoman

todoman is a simple command line todo list manager, I have been using it for few months now and it’s pretty great. I am also trying to contribute to it.

After I changed my machine, I wasn’t able to color-code my lists, at first, thought I was doing something wrong, but after re-checking, I finally posted an issue — In fact, while writing this, I tried to open it in iTerm2 (to which I switched today ). it’s all colourful and I am happy again. :-)

Miscellaneous

A lesson

What I think I did wrong was that I took up all these tasks simultaneously which resulted in a lot of chaos. I found more and more interesting things to do ( A different post ) — It was overwhelming. At a time, I had had more than 100 tabs opened in over 4 windows.

Then, I got up at 3PM today (I slept at 7 AM), and since then doing a clean up — reading/replying to all the emails. and closing all the tabs. After 12 hrs of deliberate work, I am trying to get things done. :-)

Next Post

What to expect in my next post?

PS: My spacebar seems a bit weird sometimes :/ , I suspect this might be either because of the posture in which I work sometimes or it might be a manufacturing defect.

I am just skeptical ;p

I am on a macbook air, if anyone has had any such experience, please share! ;-)

change - June 20, 2017 - Rahul Jha