On exposure
Every Friday I would look back at the past week, but would be too wiped out to articulate it clearly. This occurrence was especially annoying last week, as it marked a quarter into the batch.
I've covered a number of different areas in the first three weeks. At a coffee chat today I realized the time so far had not reinforced my interest in any particularly, but instead exposed me to a whole new world of things. Suppose I had three choices before, how strongly I feel about each of them hasn't really changed. However I now know there are seven choices.
Rust
I'm very much enjoying Rust. I haven't done it for long so I won't say too much, but it appears the compile times can take a while. That being said, a toy implementation of generating the 10,000th prime number averages at 0.25 seconds for Rust vs 3.88 seconds for Python (code here, inspired by post here).
Over the weekend I discovered RustPython, a Python interpreter in Rust. Since Rust can be compiled to WebAssembly, the interpreter can be made to run in the browser. The FOSDEM 2019 talk can be found here.
Content: Learning at startups
I've always believed in choosing a role that allows you to maximize your learning. In the context of startups, Paul Buchheit says it best.
https://triplebyte.com/blog/interview-with-gmail-creator-and-y-combinator-partner-paul-buchheit
I would suggest thinking about joining a startup as more like going to grad school to learn. Optimize around learning when choosing a job. That’s the best thing. Then if a startup fails, you can always go back to Google and probably get paid a lot more, because now you’re actually a much better engineer than you would have been if you had stayed there like everyone else.