Browse Month

December 2017

Highlights and Lowlights (2017 Review)

I did four reviews at the end of each quarter (see: Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4). Typically, I link each of these reviews to a song I’d been listening to a lot during the quarter. This is usually based on whether I empathise with the singer’s persona, as I find these more ‘sticky’ than merely good instrumentals or well-executed pieces. For a quick recap, the songs were:

  • Q1: “Back from the Edge”, James Arthur
  • Q2: “7 Years”, Ben Schuller (this is a Lukas Graham cover)
  • Q3: “Mercy”, Shawn Mendes
  • Q4: “Back to You”, Louis Tomlinson and Bebe Rexha

This selection makes it seem like it’s been a rather turbulent year. It has been, but looking back on things I think it’s certainly been decent enough too. Of course, variance and volatility don’t necessarily imply growth, but it certainly feels like the problems and struggles I’ve had have been beneficial. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the more notable things that have happened to me this year.

Commuting on Foot

I started walking to and from work instead of taking the tube. In an earlier post, I calculated that I was being paid an effective wage of £27.59 an hour to do this. I think I kept up with this through most of the year; that walk while initially taxing feels quite normal now. It’s a good bit of morning exercise for me to clear my head before starting work, and I find it a convenient time to call home too. Furthermore, the amount of money saved is quite substantial; I’d imagine I’d spend £126.80 a month for the monthly travelcard, but in practice my monthly transport expenses are more in the range of £20, so that’s an extra £1200 per year.

To be fair, I’ve noticed that I’ve worn through shoes much quicker this year (the route is about 2.5 km each way), so maybe depreciation should additionally be factored in to the cost. Even then, I’ve been disciplined about intelligently shopping sales for walking/running shoes; I’ve spent less than £100 on shoes this year, so factoring that in we’re still looking at more than £1000 in savings.

AI Down Under

I took two weeks out in late August to present at IJCAI 2017 in Melbourne, Australia (plus a short holiday, and a stop-over in Singapore). I do have a bit of a soft spot for pure, hard theoretical computer science, and this certainly allowed me to show off some of that. Besides actually giving the LDLK talk, the non-technical programme was also very interesting; I managed to meet quite a number of interesting researchers whom I only recognised from their papers, there were a variety of interesting venues, and there was also an exhibition where some robots attempted to compete in football.

My own non-technical programme was great too – I enjoyed touring parts of Melbourne, the hotel (the Crown Metropol) was very comfortable, and of course returning home was good, even if only for a short while. The 24-hour flight was pretty intense, but there wasn’t really a compelling alternative.

Greed and Fear

Cryptocurrencies are, of course, a highly volatile asset class. I’ve been maintaining modest long positions in a couple of them; the extreme swings have certainly highlighted the presence of these ‘primal forces’; while I did buy into BTC under $5000, there’s a part of me that’s still a bit miffed that I didn’t initiate a larger position then. I extracted my cost basis at $17000 and will probably let the rest ride.

In total, my portfolio gained about 18 percent this year. I’ve never actually been through a bear market (well, at least with a large investment holding). There was the correction in early 2016, but my portfolio is substantially larger now. While I’m of course familiar with Buffett’s well known hamburger analogy – since I’m a net buyer of stocks I should be happy when they go on sale – I’m in a position where I could at least on paper lose half a year’s salary if things get ugly (or even more – during the Great Depression, stocks crashed by roughly 90%).

Cross-Border Connections

It has been more than a year since my cohort at Imperial graduated. The one-year mark is significant for a few of my friends, because one year is a common requirement for intra-company transfer visas (at least in the UK and in the US). I’ve also had friends who started outright overseas (much like what I did). Keeping in touch has been somewhat tricky, especially bearing in mind timezones – but I think it has been going fine.

I’m starting to see what I thought was the most likely scenario as far as maintaining these connections post-university pan out. I got pretty stressed last year thinking that it would be difficult to keep these ticking over. I’m aware I have a tendency to inaccurately amplify small risks, and this turned out to be the case here.

Builders

I always had a bit of skepticism about 24-hour hackathons whilst in university (bad work practices, too many flashy demos without actual reasonable implementation); that said, I do like the concept of hack weeks and have participated actively in every one of them that’s been on whilst I’ve been at Palantir. Five to nine days is long enough that people aren’t generally going to be working too unsustainably (though I have certainly felt the burn from pushing hard on these – even then it’s 80 hours a week hard, nothing near 168). I’d definitely classify the hackweek we had in summer as a major highlight of the year, and the one in winter as something nice too.

It’s a nice occasional reminder of the ‘core’ parts of my job I like (that said I do also enjoy interviewing and tech-talks). I enjoy many of the projects I do for these hackweeks because I get to apply fancy CS things that I’ve read about or otherwise worked on while also testing my engineering and rapid-iteration skills. There is a claim that if one wishes to go fast, one should go alone; if one wishes to go far, one should go in a group – and while the hack-week form of many of the things I’ve worked on doesn’t make it into production, the rush of rapid development is exciting and some form of what I work on tends to, indeed, make it to production.

Inverse Boiling a Frog (2017 Q4 Review)

Q4 hasn’t ended yet, but this will probably be the last post I write before doing a more general overall review for the year.

There’s a part of me that looks back at Q4 and complains that there hasn’t been much growth or development at all; stacking this with the opening thesis of the Q3 review, it’s very easy for me to be harsh on myself for all this.

Some of this is because much of the improvement has probably been gradual – there weren’t large one-shot spurts and/or reminders that progress was being made, unlike in Q2 (which had a strong hackweek project and a paper acceptance at IJCAI, for instance). I can find it easy to discount growth as I don’t always remember difficulties experienced in the past that clearly. Nonetheless, it’s well known that the aggregation of marginal gains can and often does deliver big wins over time. Although the period does not feel like it was a high-growth period, looking back 4 or 6 months does reveal several larger differences in terms of knowledge about AtlasDB, Java and other projects at Palantir too. It’s kind of an inverse to the often told story of a frog being boiled alive.

The GitHub pull-request count for this quarter is 21, which is a significant drop from previous quarters (we were at 30 in Q3). Some of this is because I’ve spent more time reviewing others’ code; some of this has been looking at development work elsewhere too. Other professional goals have been going reasonably well too, and usefully I now have concrete things to think about as far as growth is concerned.

On the academic front things have quietened down a little. We’ve written and submitted another paper, but after this the next target would probably be a journal paper (there isn’t really that much more material in the thesis, unfortunately!). This was probably the hardest paper to write, mainly because it was based on the last part of the thesis and I waved my hands a lot in the original proofs I wrote – these needed to be formalised, and some of this formalisation was difficult!

Financially, at least up to this point in the year, things seem to have gone well, maybe even too well. The REITs (even though global) and expectedly the bonds have been slowing things down a bit, but I guess that’s the price one pays for diversification. I remember reading an article on the Permanent Portfolio on Monevator that claimed that many investors fail to diversify into assets that actually have negative correlations.

(N.B. I hold the JK portfolio, of course, and also the Fidelity world index, LS80, iShares property fund, BTC and GBP.)

There is a more complete visualisation of the performance of varying asset classes called the Callan periodic table – I think what spooks me somewhat is seeing everything in the black (well, at least in nominal terms; in the UK at least cash in large quantities would probably fail to deliver above the roughly 3 percent inflation we’re dealing with, and the 1.8 percent from the property fund is clearly below that too).

Spending this quarter was fairly normal. It was higher than a real base-line level, though mainly because I decided to splurge a little to exploit some Black Friday deals when I was visiting Palo Alto. Food expenses – specifically eating out with friends went up significantly this quarter too. December also always tends to be spendy, for various reasons (birthday, Christmas…)

Looking at comms, things have gone pretty well this time around. As always, there are a couple of lapses, but I’ve been able to dedicate time to coordinating meetups, and done this quite a few times.

Last quarter I mentioned that I find that I have an inner voice that tends to berate me for underperformance, though the standards said voice sets are often too high. I’ve started thinking a bit more around the rationale behind said high standards, though. Think of it as moving from “why are you failing to save 70 percent of your income?”, or “why aren’t you working a 65 hour work week?”, say, to “why do you want to save 70 percent of your income?” or “why do you want to work a 65 hour work week?”. Back in university, these targets were often natural consequences of regular work for me – I like to do things well, generally – and so I’d easily accept “because it’s hard” and because it was in general alignment with my goals at the time. In the long run, however, it’s probably a bad idea; the cost is real. It’s a powerful tool, and I do recognise the drive it provides as far as improvement is concerned, though.

In a sense, while I still seek relief and mercy from the criticism of said inner voice (as in the Q3 review), I’ve also started questioning its purpose while still trying to appreciate its importance as far as overall personal development is concerned. Killing this perpetual hunger for continuous improvement would be a bad idea, so…

I love it, I hate it, and I can’t take it
But I keep on coming back to you

(Yes, another alternative interpretation – this time of this song though substantially more creative liberty has been taken this time around. I’m… pleasantly surprised; I think of the members of One Direction I was probably only expecting material from Zayn Malik and Harry Styles post-breakup, but the others have put out good work, and I’d say more in line with my tastes than those two.)