I wrote yesterday how I didn’t have a project to work on had I did Recurse Center this time around between roles. I realized that it’s only half true. Yes I need to sharpen my programming skills for interviews. However I do have something that I’ve been focusing on: people skills.
What’s different here is (1) it’s not directly related to software, and (2) it takes time. It takes time to come up with the questions to ask, to read up materials, to reflect on the ideas that surface. It’s not “my Raft implementation is working!”. There’s no start and finish. It’s an ongoing process.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling stuck when looking for jobs. I’d like to take the time to explore more this time. Late last year I went to my first networking event since 2015. I look forward to more. I expect to feel out of place, but hey, that’s a chance to grow out of my comfort zone. It’s an opportunity to see what else is out there, what one could serendipitously discover.
In the past I’ve also gotten into the habit of focusing on a single project. I’m going to try having multiple small projects in parallel. Yes, some of them will involve the front end. In fact I played around with Modal as meetup prep to discover I can use it to run Whisper in the cloud (transcribing an hour-long audio clip takes 8 hours locally).
I didn’t complete Advent of Code Day 12. What’s interesting is that I write code that gives a closer representation of the problem, rather than a simplification that helps get the answer. For example, I would generate all permutations of a string, instead of counting how many there are. Is this brute force? Sort of, though even after optimizing string permutation it's still too slow. I suppose it’s slower to handle 1 million strings instead of a counter at 1 million.