Best Things and Stuff of 2023

I have occasionally written this type of a post inspired by Michael Fogus, so here I am doing it again for 2023.

Books Read

A lot

Best Technical Books Read

• How to Open Source – A great little practical book about not just the how but also the why of contributing to open source
• Impractical Python Projects – Don’t let the name fool you – the projects are very well designed and implemented. Got a lot out of this one
• The Recursive Book of Recursion – Another great book. Digs deep, explains the concepts really well, and furnishes fully fleshed out examples

Best Non-fiction Books Read

• Basic Economics – an opinionated but worthwhile view at capitalism
• Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity – a comprehensive guide on how and why to live a long life
• Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life – great mental and practical tools from one of the greatest ever
• The Little Book that Still Beats the Market – a practical guide to one way of investing

Best Fiction Books Read

• Crime and Punishment – truly a classic and a masterpiece. Dostoevsky is a master in psychological insights and character development

Favorite MOOC Courses Finished

• Complete Guide to Protocol Buffers 3 (Udemy) – needed it for work and the course gave me what I needed
• gRPC [Java] Masterclass: Build Modern API & Microservices (Udemy) – ditto
• InventrIO Adventure Kit: 30 Days Lost in Space – my foray into electronics. Pretty good if not great

Notable Professional Things Tried for the First Time

• Finally fully transitioned to Neovim
• ReactJS
• LogSeq – a great personal knowledge management tool based on linked Markdown pages. The storage can be completely local to the user
• Spring Framework and Spring Boot – for work
• ChatGPT
• Played Wordle for the first time
• LocalStack
• OpenAPI
• Snowflake
• MIPS Assembly
• Doom Emacs – I gave up on Spacemacs and now use Doom for my Org Mode needs
• Julia lang
• Rust lang
• Logic Pro X
• StreamDeck
• CSS Flexbox
• CSS Grid
• [Finance] Started treating investments as a legitimate side hustle

Notable Personal Things Tried for the First time

• Truff black truffle olive oil
• Used a dopp kit for carrying toiletries while traveling
• Started dressing up a notch
• Watched the Super Bowl live for the first time
• Tiege Hanley skincare system
• Mayweather boxing gym
• Read some epic fantasy novels
• Started using a Waterpik
• Lifetime Fitness
• Used an AirDyne, a SkiErg, and a curved treadmill
• Supplemented with glutathione and berberine
• A cashmere (only 15%) cardigan
• Drove a Ford Mustang as a rental during car repair
• Withings Body Comp
• A Kiritsuke Japanese-style German-Italian kitchen knife
• Saw the Titanic Exhibit in Las Vegas
• Had foie gras
• Eau Savage by Christian Dior
• Got a Dutch oven
• Got Spotify Premium
• Drove a Volkswagen Jetta GLI as a rental while traveling
• Drove a Mini Cruiser while traveling
• Got a Roland FP-30X digital acoustic piano
• Got Simply Piano and Yousician memberships
• Thrival Recovery muscle release kit
• Hypertrophy Coach app
• Arnold’s The Pump Club app
• Got a succulent plant
• Tried various cheeses – roquefort, gorgonzola, fromager d’affinois
• Uploaded YouTube videos for the first time
• A dashcam
• Zchocolat (yum!)
• Saw the Sphere in Las Vegas
• Had arancini for the first time
• A turtleneck

Influential People / Celebrities Met

• Sadly, none this year

Notable Alcohol Discovered

• Glenmorangie Signet whiskey

Onwards to 2024!

Thursday Night Football on Amazon

I don’t ever talk about work on here, and mostly corporate work doesn’t see the light of day or doesn’t see the public eye like this, but this is an exception, because it’s publicly visible now. I contributed heavily to the automated system that produced the team vs team and the background images (and only images, not the streaming content or anything else) that you see on Amazon now concerning Thursday Night Football, some of the games from which are to be broadcast soon. Swipe to see screenshots and search for Thursday Night Football on Amazon to see more images.

Go here now for the details.

A Sample use of Omnifocus for Ultimate Productivity

I have a lot of different interests, and I would like to keep improving my skills in all those areas relentlessly, for various professional and personal reasons.

I have spent a lot of time improving my productivity system that can enable me to actually make concrete, sustained progress in all those areas. Omnifocus is my tool of choice that I’ve settled upon now after trying a handful of other options. I basically follow Rachel Andrew’s suggestion (based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done), but over time I have further refined my system based on what I see/read online and what I discover about my own process and habits through weekend reflections.

My current system is as follows. Every week I’d set up weekly goals, evenly spread across areas such as tech reading, non-tech reading, health & fitness reading, problem solving practice through TopCoder and CodeWars, online courses, physical fitness goals, paperwork, goals related to improving my natural language skills, etc. etc. In the past I used to have some time set aside for all these activities every day, but it wasn’t feasible to attack all of them every day, and a lack of concrete goals resulted in me always missing things and falling behind. Then after struggling with getting everything done for a couple of years, accumulating piles of backlogs, and further inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger (he has talked about his habit of setting goals a lot at a lot of places, in his books and during interviews), I switched to a goal oriented approach, and eventually switched completely to only using that, which in my case means setting weekly goals in all the areas I would have tried to hit every day earlier, and then try to accomplish those goals at any time during the week.

The advantages of doing this seem manifold to me – first, you have something concrete to show for it at the end of the week (e.g. finished reading this book, added that feature to that codebase, deadlifted these many pounds) rather than saying that you spent 60 hours doing ‘some stuff’ during the week. Second, it is relieving to know that there is nothing that has to happen every day, but rather that you have the freedom to accomplish the goals whenever you get/find time.

This is where Omnifocus comes in. To facilitate the above, I have set up folders, projects, and action items for all these individual goals. Some of them are one-time, some of them repeat with a given frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.). I try to use no other lists but only Omnifocus for recording/tracking everything. If I have an item that I am not sure about, or don’t know what project/context that item belongs to, I’d put it in the Omnifocus inbox, to be sorted out later. The weekly goals are reflected as flagged items in Omnifocus, which I can view all together using the context view. I use deadlines sparingly, as suggested by this post, but admittedly some items do have deadlines, and some have to be done regularly (so they implicitly have deadlines or dates associated with them). The items that are overdue or have concrete deadlines get my attention first, and then I move on to working on the flagged items set as  my weekly goals.

In addition to all of the above I have been learning to use Omnifocus contexts more effectively. For the longest time I had contexts in it that might as well just have been projects on their own – e.g. ‘coding’, ‘admin work’. But I realized that it’s better to use the location/place where you’ll get those items done reflected in the contexts. Now I have moved on to using contexts like online, offline, at-home-only, requires desk, outside, treadmill (yes, because I can watch videos from Lynda or Coursera on a treadmill!). I find it so much more effective because being able to knock out similar tasks that can all be done at a given place, in blocks of time, without context switching, is so much easier and more efficient. Finally, I also have one context called most-important-items, which helps me focus my energies on a handful of items (mostly three) at a given point in time. I got this idea from this post.

Our lives are becoming more and more information heavy, and there is a great opportunity to live a very ‘rich’ life in terms of the various things we can do. If we are organized, we can do so easily, effectively, and in a sustained manner.

Best of 2016

As is the tradition of many technologists, I am writing about some of the best things that I discovered or did in 2016. This post is a little bit late, but I discovered a lot of great things in 2016 that I believe deserve to be shared.

Total books read: 50

Best non-technical books read
Michio Kaku – The Future of the Mind: It’s nice to know what science could bring to our lives. Dr Kaku is a visionary and while I find many of his predictions very ‘out there’, he is very comprehensive in his style and claims, which makes his books a delight to consume

Best technical books read
Kenneth Reitz & Tanya Schlusser – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python: Best Practices for Development. While not for the beginner, if you use any modicum of Python at your day job and have been churning out code in Python for a while, I highly recommend grabbing a copy. It walks you through some of the best practices as well as the best known and highly used libraries out there, which is a must have in your toolbox

Best technical videos consumed
Kent Beck’s ‘livestorm’ about convex and concave software projects

Best new technologies discovered and used
Docker: containerization is very hot right now
WebSocket: A technology for maintaining full duplex communication between peers
Nginx: A powerful and scalable Web server

Best new languages discovered and used
Lua: A lightweight but very powerful ‘glue’ language

Best new hardware acquired and used
Pok3r keyboard (it has clear keys; and I am not sure whether I like it better than my DAS keyboard with blue keys, but it’s still pretty nice), Steelcase Gesture (finally got onto the bandwagon of expensive ergonomic ‘programmer’ chairs), Amazon Echo

Best new apps discovered and used
Productive (iOS) – a nice way to build habits – you can select one of the built-in habits or add your own, and you can select icons, frequencies, etc. It’s also nice to be able to view stats on the individual habits to see how well you’ve been doing
CleanMyMac (macOS) – does a good job of cleaning up extraneous files left over by installers and the system itself

Best new fitness videos consumed
Fittest on Earth (Netflix) – an incredible, candid look at the Crossfit lifestyle

Best new workout technique discovered and used
Zottman curls – a comprehensive arms exercise that targets both the biceps and triceps

Best new nutritional supplements discovered and used
Creatine and magnesium. I can’t believe I’ve lived this long without these. Definitely game changers

What I Learned in 2015

A bit too late for this kind of post, but I wanted to put it out there anyway. 2015 was once again a great year full of reading, learning, and discovery. Here I summarize all that a little bit. I read 50 books in 2015, which is a personal record. Here’s a list: Books read in 2015. Looking at this list, the lesson learned is to read more technical books (computer science/ programming) in 2016. I watched a large number of technical videos online again – upwards of 50 – with many new Lynda and TUTS+ videos. I got certified in 5 Coursera courses, which is also an improvement over the previous years. In 2015 I did not dedicate sufficient time to open source/ personal side project coding, as reflected on my GitHub account. In 2016 the plan is to correct that and increase the number of contributions throughout the year. Although I did manage to reach out in the community a little bit, visiting Data Day Texas (thanks to work). I met some famous developers and thinkers from the community there, which was fantastic. As far as new technology is concerned I started learning Java 8, which holds a lot of promise for the future. I bought and got into some new gizmos, like always. I even began dabbling into Arduino and IoT, despite initial misgivings. On the personal fitness side, in 2015 I started lifting old-school, with lots of deadlifts, push-presses, clean and presses, bench presses, and squats. I also got started with some recovery techniques like foam rolling and deep tissue massages. It’s been a great thing so far and I plan to continue that this year, hitting more and more personal records. I also got to travel a lot in 2015, exploring a little bit more everywhere. Hoping for more substantial improvements in 2016.

Books Read in 2014 etc.: A Retrospective

Since it’s very fashionable these days, here’s a list of some of the best books I read in 2014.

Technology

1. Paul Gries, Jennifer Campbell, Jason Montojo; Practical Programming, The Pragmatic Bookshelf

2. Tim Ottinger, Use Vim Like a Pro, LeanPub

3. Josh Carter, New Programmer’s Survival Manual, The Pragmatic Bookshelf

4. Kent Beck, Test Driven Development by Example, Addison-Wesley

5. Casey Reas and Ben Fry,  Getting Started with Processing, OReilly

6. Bruce Tate, Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, The Pragmatic Bookshelf

7. Corey Haines, Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design, LeanPub

8. Steven Pousty and Katie J Miller, Getting Started with OpenShift, OReilly

9. Kent Beck, Implementation Patterns, InformIt

10. Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, Head First Java, OReilly

11. Jeroen Janssens, Data Science at the Command Line, OReilly

Non-fiction

1. Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work – (audio book)

2. Seth Godin,  Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us – (audio book)

3. Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning – (audio book)

4. Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick (audio book)

5. Chris Guillebeau, The Art of Non-Conformity (audio book)

6. Sally Hogshead, Fascinate (audio book)

7. Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You (audio book)

8. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Executive Presence (audio book)

9. Ken Segall, Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success (audio book)

10. Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements (audio book)

11. Phil Pallen, Shut Up and Tweet (audio book)

12. Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project, Harper

13. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, Bantam Books

Health and Fitness

1. Joe Kutner, The Healthy Programmer, The Pragmatic Bookshelf

3. Chrissie Wellington, A Life Without Limits (iBooks)

4. Martin Rooney, Train to Win,

Additionally, I watched upwards of 100 long-ish educational videos, got certified in two Coursera courses (Machine Learning and Nutrition & Physical Activity for Health), went through several technical tutorials, and picked up a tiny bit of some new programming languages (Io, Prolog, Rust, Go, etc.). I also attended the ACL conference in Baltimore, and met Prof. Dan Jurafsky. At work too I got to play with some new technologies and got to travel a lot for work. There was some other stuff too but this much makes sense on a professional blog 🙂 Here’s to an even more intense 2015!

2013: Ein Jahr im Rückblick

Das Jahr 2013 war für mich besonders bedeutungsvoll und erfolgreich. Ich hätte kaum ahnen können, wie sehr sich mein Leben innerhalb von einem Jahr ändern wird. Mir sind Sachen passiert, die in der Vergangenheit nie passiert hatten. Aber ich muss gestehen, ich hab selbst auch Sachen gemacht, und Dinge erledigt, die ich vorher weder gemacht habe noch die Gelegenheit gehabt habe überhaupt machen zu können.

Also los geht´s. In kurzen Worten schreibe ich über meine heurigen Erfahrungen und Ergebnisse.

Zunächst einmal bin ich letztes Jahr mit meiner Doktorarbeit fertig geworden und habe den Doktortitel verliehen bekommen. Das war aber erst in Mai. In Jänner 2013 selbst hab ich angefangen bei IBM in Austin vollzeit zu arbeiten. Nachdem man so eine PhD Ausbildung verdient hat und deswegen einige Jahre schon als armer Student verbracht hat, in den Staaten kriegt man heutzutage meistens eine anständige Stelle mit einem genauso anständigen Gehalt. Das Geld verändert das Leben – man kann dann Sachen besitzen und Abenteure planen die ohne Geld gar nicht möglich wären. Aber nichtsdestotrotz ist das für mich persönlich nur der Anfang der Geschichte und keinesfalls das Wichtigste. Ich hab aber auf jeden Fall Glück gehabt.

Arbeitsmäßig arbeite ich an Watson, das Question Answering System von IBM wovon im Moment überall gesprochen wird. So ein behilflicher Computer bzw. Programm aufzubauen ist faszinierend, weil auf der einen Seite werden so viele Kunden und Systeme dadurch geholfen (hoffentlich), und auf der anderen Seite ist das alles sowohl für Entwickler als auch für Forscher äußerst interessant und anspruchsvoll. Es ist eine Herausvorderung Watson wirklich `intelligent´ zu machen und es wird stets daran mit Leib und Seele gearbeitet. Besonders gefällt mir auch die spezifischen Technologien die hier verwendet werden.

Dank meinem Job hab ich mir dieses Jahr ein Auto leisten können. Ein eigenes Auto zu haben ist super toll und ein Muss in Amerika. Lustig, dass ich jahrelang darauf warten müssen habe, bevor ich mich auch ein stolzer Autobesitzer nennen dürfte.

Außerdem haben mich heuer meine Eltern besucht und sind drei Monate bei mir geblieben. Sie waren so im Ausland noch nie unterwegs. Im Mai habe ich sie 225 Meilen nach meiner Unistadt gefahren und wir waren bei der akademischen Abschlussfeier anwesend. Das war ganz toll und es war super, meine Professorin und noch ein paar Leute wieder sehen zu können. Während ich gefahren bin haben wir jedes Mal Gewitter begegnet, und ich muss zugeben, dass es ziemlich toll (und stressig) war durch solche Gewitter zu fahren als ich fast nichts sehen können habe. Texas halt, im Sommer.

Meine Eltern haben hier in Amerika eine tolle Zeit gehabt – alles war ziemlich neu für sie. Ich habe ihnen ziemlich viel gezeigt und ganz viele Schmanklern (Leckerbissen) aus der ganzen Welt haben sie auch kosten können. Sie sagen mir sogar jetzt, dass sie sich an unsere Trips nach Whole Foods und Target gut erinnern. Sehnsucht haben sie jetzt auch, mich noch einmal zu besuchen.

Da ich dieses Jahr in eine größere Wohnung gezogen bin hab ich die Wohnung möblieren müssen, und hab mir außerdem auch mitunter `Zeuge´ gegönnt, damit meine Wohnung so halbwegs anständig und bewohnbar wird.

Sofort nachdem meine Eltern wieder nach Indien geflogen bin hab ich wieder reisen müssen. Für 3 Monate hab ich in der nähe von New York gewohnt und in Yorktown Heights, NY am TJ Watson Research Center gearbeitet. Jedes Wochenende musste ich aber das Hotel verlassen, und so hab ich die Gelegenheit auch gut benützt mal New York City zu besuchen und alles zu machen, die Touristen normalerweise so in NYC machen. Eine rießige, faszinierende Stadt voller Möglichkeit kann ich nur sagen. In der Gegend bin ich Mietwagen gefahren und bin auch mit öffentlichen Verkehrsmittel unterwegs gewesen. Das alles hab ich Dank meiner Firma bezahlt bekommen! Und was Reisen angeht habe ich ansonsten auch das erste Mal im Leben Paid Time Off gehabt. Zur Weihnachten bin ich zu einer Freundin in Indianapolis geflogen, und wurde unerwartet sogar zu First Class `aufgerüstet´ – auch das erste Mal im Leben. Echt tolle Erfahrung muss ich sagen. Dann hab ich in -14 Grad geholfen, ein Weihnachtsbaum auszuwählen, abzusägen, und später zu Hause sogar zu dekorieren. Nachdem wir alle toll gefeiert haben und Brettspiele gespielt haben, bin ich weiter nach San Diego geflogen, wo es demgegenüber 20 Grad gewesen ist. SeaWorld, Zoo und La Jolla hab ich gesehen und hab eine tolle Zeit gehabt. California hab ich unbedingt sehr gerne und würde ingendwann einmal bestimmt gerne irgendwo in California wohnen.

In Austin zu leben ist auch ziemlich toll. Es gibt allerlei Läden und Supermarkets, Fitnessstudios, Meetups, Konferenzen usw. Viel Möglichkeit, wann auch immer nach der Arbeit noch Zeit bleibt (und wenn der Straßenverkehr nicht extrem schlimm ist). Es gibt wirklich viel zu tun, und ich glaube, dass jeder hier etwas für seine Interessen finden kann.

Vor 2 Jahren hab ich meinen ersten Mac gekauft und jetzt kann ich wirklich sagen, dass ich ein großer Mac bzw. Apple Fan geworden bin. Alle meine Computer hab ich gut individuell angepasst und es macht mir wirklich Spaß damit jetzt zu arbeiten, selbst zu lernen, lesen und Hobbyprojekte zu bauen. Insgesamt in 2013 habe ich 28 Bücher gelesen (über Programmierung, Non-fiction, Romane – da ich in NY jeden Tag fast eine Stunde fahren müssen habe, hab ich die Gelegenheit auch gut verwendet Hörbücher zuzuhören), 33 MOOC Kurse absolviert (Coursera, CodeSchool, Lynda usw), mir 78 Videos über Programmierung auf Youtube angesehen, körperlich in Training einige Rekorde gebrochen und einiges neu ausprobiert, war fürs erste Mal im Gold’s Gym, Minigolf und Topgolf gespielt, einer Autorin mit ihrem Roman geholfen (Feedback geliefert), 2 neue offenbare Projekte angefangen, Pair-programmiert, vollzeit gearbeitet (und dabei viel Neues gelernt) und auch sonst so viel Neues gemacht (wie zum Beispiel SciPy in Austin besucht, ein paar Python-celebrities real getroffen, usw usf.)

Alles in allem ein echt hervorragendes und wundervolles Jahr. Jetzt bin ich mal gespannt was das neue Jahr so bringen wird. Träume hab ich schon, aber ich verrate sie wahrscheinlich später 😉

2013 Blog Activity in Review

The WordPress.com stats helper automation script prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,500 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Too much work at your tech job? Here’s a new credo for you…

So, yet another list of how we computer folks can improve our lives… let’s tackle the points one by one. Telecommuting… as much as I like the idea of showing your boss your face as often as possible, this point actually makes sense. Save gas, save time, save money on eating out (you can cook while your big program is running at home), and just report to your boss your progress and meet with her once/twice a weak. Not a bad deal, now that I think about it. Ok. So far so good. Making regular local and remote updates. Good idea. Using keyboard shortcuts as much as you can instead of always reaching for the mouse. Good idea. Ergonomic, and stylish as if you were Tony Stark working with Jarvis on your Ironman suit 😉 (Ok, maybe you’re not moving 3D images with your hands, but it does look like you’re a computer genius from a Hollywood movie rather than an average user if you use the keyboard rather than the mouse.) Keeping track of your calories for free? Who doesn’t want that? About managing email – I personally like to manage mine in a slightly different way, but I think that’s subjective.

Hmm, I think this much analysis is enough and proves that the article is readable. Now to actually follow through with it, that’s a completely different story…

Green’s the word

Rising energy and water costs are forcing Americans to go green. According to this article from Reuters, over the last 3 years, more than 330,000 homes have been built in the United States with more and more “green” and environment-friendly features, like solar-power, environmentally sustainable energy, and other green technologies. And the best part is, such homes, once thought to be a luxury for the rich, seem more and more accessible to the average middle class American families. It is a country-wide trend and it is growing. And well, why not – it is cheap, it is environment-friendly, and it saves the big blue planet we call home.