W3D4 - The travails of the blog post writer

I read my own posts over the past 2 days and I’m disappointed. No wit, no style, no panache. Such is the reality of forcing yourself to write.

I often start my day responding to posts and sharing resources where relevant. I’ll make a point to add a section below to highlight these.

The notable event today was attending Modal Labs’ meetup. Modal is building a tool to cut down the wait on each iteration loop when deploying to the cloud. Writing code is more fun on dev because you get these fast feedback cycles, and there’s always a bit of ceremony with setting up AWS, configs etc. Modal makes this easy by allowing you run code in the cloud by simply adding a decorator, which is pretty cool.

I’ve been making a point to attend events as a way to ‘widen the aperture’ in my job search. In the past I’ve gone through friends, ex-colleagues and recruiters, but now I’m curious to see what else is out there. I may end up in that direction; at least now I can say I took the chance to explore a bit more. Plus a lot of what’s being developed with generative AI is so new, it’s much easier to know what’s getting traction when you get to see how excited people are talking about it.

I had discovered Full Stack LLM bootcamp before through Andrej Karpathy tweeting about it, yesterday I got to meet someone who created the content. I know, I already have other projects in mind but perhaps it’ll be good homework before the next meetup by Weights + Biases.

I’m only 30 mins in into David Perell’s interview on How Do You Use ChatGPT but I am blown away. Highly recommend watching the first 5 minutes to see if it’s your thing. What’s so cool about it? I’m very impressed how deliberate he is at learning about himself and better understand what he can be world-class at, and I was amazed to see how he uses ChatGPT in that process.

I’m planning to restart the RC event on the Staff Engineer roundtable next week! I’ll end this post with a quote from Cindy Wu.

also one thing my engineering coach said to me that stuck with me that in every situation you have at least 3 options 1/ do nothing 2/ acceptance 3/ direct action. for a long time i didn't see a difference between 1/ and 2/ but now i see that they are very different. 

i think when i do 1/ i stay grumpy if i am upset about the situation. BUT if i do 2/ then i should feel more at peace with whatever mediocrity or imperfections i see. hope to be able to hone this muscle that helps me find acceptance in the things that we choose not to affect.


All the resources I consumed

All the resources I shared