Sunday, 17 February 2013

Late New Years' resolutions

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing Hacker News when I happened upon Matthew Might's 12 resolutions for programmers. Eschewing the obvious "1920x1080" jokes, I read on, and realised that he actually had some very good points.



By pure coincidence, I'd already (to some extent) kept the first two - having a non-functioning phone (which locked me out of many online accounts via 2-step verification) , I'd been living a considerably more analog life for the first month of 2013, and my fitness has really reached new a peak in February (mostly helped by the location of a gym on the ground floor of my apartment building!)

(Yes, that's not what he really meant by "Go analog", but January was almost over by the time I read this!)

With that in mind, I'm planning to stick to Matthew's suggestions, and am already thinking about what should be my "Embrace the uncomfortable". Current possibilities are:

  • try out emacs (probably counter-intuitive, since I've only just become vaguely comfortable with vi, and emacs isn't supported on my EC2 box)
  • "read an acclaimed novel from a genre you don't like" - which, in my case, would probably be historical non-fiction
  • fast once a week
  • give R/ruby/Go a decent try
Any other suggestions welcome!

That said, I've been very conscious of time-keeping efficiency recently, so I'm making a late New Years' resolution right now - restricting myself to only browsing Reddit twice a day. I've become very conscious that it's my "go-to" timewaster whenever I have dead time at home - if a program's taking a while to compile, or a video's buffering, I'll open up a Reddit tab to kill those few seconds, and end up wasting half an hour on it. No more. It's a decent resource (if subreddits are properly curated!) in itself, so there'd be no point in cutting myself off from it entirely, but it's worryingly more-ish as a time-filler - "while(true): oh, all these links are purple, but I'm sure there'll be more new stuff on the next page..."

We'll see how long that lasts :)

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