When I was a student, the academic year was a rather friendly source of periodicity in doing reviews. The ends of the various academic terms lined up reasonably well with Q4, Q1 and Q2 reviews, and a Q3 review was typically reflection about what I got up to over the summer. I don’t think there has been a single large and direct visible change in my circumstances compared to that a year ago. I can see how under such conditions, days and weeks may all blend together into a mush of time. Of course, one can argue that there are still other distinctive events; there are obviously the seasons in weather terms, and also other cyclic patterns (e.g. college recruiting season with high interview volume, winter holidays).
In terms of development, while quantifying growth is always challenging I like to think that I’ve started to see some distinct improvements this quarter. I’m basically the product owner of a rather small but absolutely platform-critical service, and have also started driving some tasks that involve cross-team coordination. The computer-scientist part of me is also satisfied; a paper on model checking multi-agent systems against LDLK specifications on finite traces received an acceptance at AAMAS18, and there is another patent going into the pipeline. Referencing the goals I set at the beginning of the year, performance is along the lines of 0.7 for growth as a developer, 1.0 for paper submission and 1.0 for patent submission (not achieved yet, but more than on track).
I have been spending quite a lot of time on work, and I noticed that I’ve been sleeping more as well – I’m not sure why, but it’s crept up from about 7 to 8 hours pretty consistently. Some of this might be stress-related and some of it might be owing to the colder weather, though I can’t quite put my finger on it.
In terms of skill development, I’m generally slightly behind my desired pace in the various disciplines I considered at the start of the year:
- This is the ninth post I’ve written this year (interpolation: 13).
- I’ve only visited Singapore and Switzerland so far this year (interpolation: 3).
- I’ve walked a daily average of 9,578 steps per day (target: 10,000).
- I don’t have metrics for singing. I can sing B4 most of the time nowadays, but haven’t focused my efforts on developing a strong upper range to a song in particular. Interestingly my lower range seems to have weakened a bit – I used to hit E2 rather easily, while now it’s a stretch.
Financially, the markets haven’t been the smoothest.
I guess this is my first significant paper loss. I easily stayed invested and even bought more through both the corrections in mid-2015 and early 2016 (e.g. considering VWRD, a USD-denominated Vanguard world stock ETF, these were drops of 13.8% and 10.9% respectively). This time around, VWRD has “only” shed around 9.5%, so it’s not even a technical correction yet. I don’t explicitly hold VWRD, but it’s likely that my portfolio has fallen by a similar amount – except that that’s actually months of income now. There is a price to pay for that equity risk premium.
In terms of friendships, most things have been ticking over acceptably well; I guess stability here is a good thing, and that for the most part has been the case. Some bumps, but nothing out of the ordinary.
I’m very aware that I’ve been spending a larger than normal amount of time this quarter thinking about philosophy and planning, mainly along what direction I’d like to take myself in. Rather expectedly, I find this more mentally taxing than working through even the nastiest and most technical parts of my Masters thesis. I don’t quite have answers yet – and even if I did, my thoughts might easily shift given a day or two (or suitable events).
This quarter, I’ve been listening to “These Days” (Rudimental with Dan Caplen, Jess Glynne and Macklemore) a fair bit. While there are parts of the song that feel a bit formulaic (the progression in the first part of the chorus, in particular), I nonetheless enjoy listening to it. It’s also fun to sing along to, with a fairly broad vocal range and numerous runs, falsetto flips and tough notes to belt out (the middle of the chorus). The song discusses a failed relationship, though all speakers seem to have accepted its failure, and express hope that they may make the best of the situation going forward.
Three years of ups and downs, nothing to show for it now
And I know it ain’t pretty when the fire burns out
I find that the idea also works well unilaterally – having failed and/or aborted ventures is fairly normal (one could argue that a complete absence of failure correlates well with not setting one’s targets to be sufficiently ambitious). Failure does hurt, especially if one has invested lots of effort in pursuing something. Nonetheless, reaching this point implies coming to terms with one’s failure, which is a very good step.
