My 2019 resolution

#Showerthoughts

Parents have done so much for us. Like literally they have spent their entire life living for us.
Just feels sad when you can’t give back anything substantial to them. On top of it when your dad says this to one of the relatives — “I am living my dream through eyes of my son”.
This statement in itself made me teary-eyed and brought chills down my spine.

I don’t think I have been able to give even a cent in return to them. Whenever there was some demand laid down by me in front of them, it was fulfilled. Be it gadgets, food, clothes, money.. Moreover they never showed me the efforts taken to fulfill those demands.

I am 23 now and it feels sad that despite earning, the ROI hasn’t been great. I am unable to do anything substantial for them to date. The struggle which they have to go through everyday, reminds me its not what I wanted. While I am in completely different city away from them; sometimes it feels I should stay with them and support in all possible ways so they have to take less efforts. This isn’t practically possible and so I ask myself what can I do to help them.

Got a response from myself that I am just another nerd programmer and that is the best I can do.
“I code, I debug, I repeat” — This has moreover become the definition of life.

So here I embark on a new journey to get better and improve in what I do best. What I have realized is if I work to the best of my potential; I can give them back everything and make their life easier…

My new year resolution will be to give back everything to my parents. (by learning and working more harder)

Few pointers to myself where I will concentrate more:

1. Data Structures and algorithms

• Complete MOOC’s from UCSD, MIT, Stanford.
• Read DSA by Mark Alien Wiess, CTCI and EPI.
• Solve more and more problems on SPOJ, Hackerrank.
• Get good with Codechef at somepoint.(literally I have been struggling to do this since many months :|)
• Get started with leetcode and interviewbit.

2. Work more in Data Science, ML domains

• Revisit data science + ML MOOC’s done during degree.
• Revisit all the data science and ML projects I have done, probably make them better.
• Go more in depth into NN and ML.
• Get more technically strong with DL.
• Read more research papers in DL community and the research work by Ian Goodfellow, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Ng and other maestros.

3. All about languages

• Get more strong with intermediate Python and start contributing to Python reference implementation.
• Go from a novice to intermediary in Go and Rust.
• Get strong hands-on over SQL, mongodb, graphql and mariadb.
• Revisit JS and retake FCC from scratch. Get basic hands-on with React and Node.
• Explore Solidity and eEhereum.
• Learn German.

4. Bits and bytes on improving myself

• Read a lot of self-help books and publish their summaries online.
• Give back the community whatever I have learnt by writing blogs on medium.
• Better utilize organizing + management tools/apps like trello and slack.
• Not visiting facebook or instagram anymore.
• Reading more and more articles on reddit, hackernews, twitter, linkedIn and quora

(PS:- I know its overwhelming but I am an avid follower of Elon Musk. So following his footsteps, I am #justquoting)

Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that… you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.