Self-Improving Means...

posted on 2011-09-05 22:59:45

Per Vognsen, whom I greatly admire, recently tweeted the following: "Least favorite type of blog: Unaccomplished 20-somethings writing self-improvement 'how to be awesome like me' articles." I would put myself in the category of unaccomplished 20-somethings but, happily, I'm not trying to tell you guys how to be awesome like me. ...cause I'm just some dude. And here's what's going on in ma domepiece (i.e. "head")...

My writing on this blog has flitted back and forth between being for an audience and being for myself. Of late, I think it's definitely swung back towards just for myself though I hope to blog some about hacking or other techno rants again in the near future. Of late, the only way I've been able to get anything down is to try and transcribe the massive looming smorgasborg of coagulating nonsense in my head. Which rather mirrors my life. Things have been good lately. I'm quite busy but I've been putting investment strategies and student loan payoff plans into place, moving, adjusting to my first "real" job, learning to be an adult (which itself is a loosely defined collection of things) and so on. I also just signed up for an AI course at Stanford that they're offering free online this Fall. My CS and programming skills are nowhere near as broad or deep as I'd like them to be. And let's not even discuss my math chops!

I've finally gotten back into a rhythm of hobby hacking again which I'm quite thankful for. My latest project has been Shuffletron, a command line music player I use daily but am not the original author of. So far I have added playlists and now...scrobbling! I'm a big fan of last.fm, simply because I listen to tons of music and enjoy tracking those habits via graphs and a few simple statistics. A lot of other people enjoy using it and so I thought I'd add scrobbling support to shuffletron. It was involved enough that it deserved its own library and that has given birth to the unimaginatively named cl-scrobbler which I've been working on for about 3 weeks now to my surprise and chagrin. Also unexpected was the ~575 lines of code (counting whitespace and tons of docstrings) it has taken to produce said library. Granted, it would be 130 lines of code less if I just added a dependency on Arnesi for plain old FIFO Queues. Anyway, I'm hoping to get it into Quicklisp in the near future and then package up shuffletron as a new potential piece of silly software for Archlinux hipsters to consume from the AUR.

Tonight I hope to start writing a study buddy that will help me get through a large directory of academic papers and code I'd like to read by picking different bite sized, daily portions for me to get through. There are things I'd like to do every day to try and continue improving my skills and I would appreciate having some automation help me do them. More on that in the near future...

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