intro

I originally wrote this post in late December of 2023, but procrastinated in publishing it until well, now, which if all goes correctly should be late Febuary of 2024 (and a leap year excitingly)!

re·flect (/rəˈflek(t)/)

With four more days in the calendar year, it feels like a good time to reflect. There is some irony in the word “reflect”. When a surface reflects light, it doesn’t absorb it, regifting it back to space. But when you’re told to reflect, one is supposed to think deeply, parse through, and absorb some clarity about a time or situation of some sort. This post is targeted towards the second type of reflection, but I, like most surfaces, don’t absorb all and so inevitably some of type 1 reflection will be in the mix.

A few shower thoughts of 2023

University vs. Work

This past May (2023), I graduated from university and started working as a full-time software engineer in July. One of my software engineering friends who is a year older than me told me something which stuck. She said “in school, there’s lots of instructions and little code; in work, there’s lots of code and little instruction”. I’ve found this to be true for the most part in my very limited experience with working.

One thing about school which doesn’t translate to a work-environment is the question of if/when something is achievable. Assignments have been honed in from generations of students to take a certain amount of time. If somebody has an idea at work, the timetable simply doesn’t exist in thinking how long something will take. Getting good at time estimation in a work environment is an important skill to have. I think as people get more experienced, they become a lot better at time estimation, because there is more experience to compare against.

Another instance where university and work differs a little is being in the state of a “learning mode” versus “doing mode”. It depends on the experience, but probably my education was spent for the majority part in the “learning mode” – focused on content consumption. There’s still a lot of that in work, but it’s harder to know when to switch between modes versus having structured cycles of readings & assignments. My more experienced co-workers seem to be in the “doing mode” – debugging, writing code, testing, the majority of the time. In some cases, I believe the “learning mode” can hinder fast development.

The thing that I found most helpful from university was the amount of random topics that I obtained a cursory understanding of. Both from being around a lot of different people and by being pushed to take an array of different classes, an academic environment for undergraduates caters towards learning a little about a lot. My dad talked about this “generalism” being an important skill: you don’t necessarily need to know everything about a subject but need to be able to know when it could be helpful and terms to look up. Of course there’s also a “specialist” route that has its values. People seem to naturally gravitate towards developing “specialist” or “generalist” tendencies.

Outide of a university environment, it’s been dawning on me that learning and doing projects outside of a structured environment poses some challenges. I still haven’t found a method that is effective for getting stuff done when the time is unstructured and find that I tend toward small projects or leave bigger projects unfinished or in a state where I get stuck and end up being a bit dismayed about the result. I think there are a few things that could help with this

  • accountability
  • collaboration
  • money: Because I think the other points are fairly intuitive, I’ll explain this one a bit more. What I mean by “money” is some monetary inscentive to get stuff done during a certain timeline. When it comes to hobby project’s that I’ve done so far, they haven’t been profit oriented. Perhaps it would be interesting to try to see how money could be made from projects. This also probably would make me and collaborators develop projects that could help or be used by others.
  • environment: surrounding yourself with an environment where 1. motivation is high and 2. equipment is readily available – is important for better development. University environments are good for development in this way but are hindered by “learning mode” and some other factors.

Environment, Genetics, and Human Behavior

I had never dabbled in the realm of “human behavior” before this 2023, but in listening to a few episodes of “Introduction to Human Evolutionary Biology”, it took me aback how much the environment and genetic dispositions can influence human behavior and the absolute complexity of humans.

Animals, too, are mind-blowing. Here’s some wonderous animal observations/facts from An Immense World just on the first few chapters!

  • Umwelt is this idea of a sensory bubble where one animal’s perceptions can go completely unnoticed by another depending on what sensory units they have adapted
  • if there is not a culture or shared vocabulary for observing a phenomenon, the intricacies of it are not uncovered
  • Salmon return home using scents remembered
  • The ocean has “smellscapes” reflecting high and low concentrations of plankton.
  • Venom in snakes has dual purpose of killing and scent detection for tracking prey later on

Molecular biology has also gotten a lot more powerful and sequencing just continues to get faster and faster. I don’t know a lot about this field at all, but my prediction is that genetic testing will become more common which is a positive feedback loop in that more testing means more data means more potential for linking genetics to current and future physical/mental conditions which hopefully means better and more preventitive diagnoses. The feedback loop is not that easy though – there’s already a ton of genetic data, so methods to parse this data whether it’s through things like LLMs, etc. will develop in parallel.

Update: in 2024, I did do a 23 and Me test. Apologies to my relatives who can now get traced for criminal activities (read about the dna test that caught the golden state killer).

Travel & Exploration

This past summer, I traveled abroad for about a month. Though it was very enjoyable, at times, it could be lonely and frustrating as traveling is prone to be occasionally. I’m still figuring out how to travel well, and here were a couple of observations and questions that I’m pondering about travel…

  • How/where to spend money
  • Having guiding questions for travel can help you plan out destinations. This tip is from Devon Zuegel’s awesome blog.
  • map out a city
  • offline maps: Downloaded maps from organic maps came in clutch so many times.
  • Spontaneous time vs. Planned time: Having planned adventures is really helpful when traveling, but when in a new place there’s going to be interesting things that just pop up, so having time to explore those is also very valuable. My family was very good at this when we traveled all together.
  • Getting a sense of geography: one of my favorite things to do when in a new place is simply to walk around for a while so that you can get a bit of a sense for the geography.