I’ve often wished that brief autobiographies and “what my average day looks like” would become as common on personal websites as having an about page. I’ve always found both fascinating, and I think understanding the broad strokes of how they got here and what their daily life looks like helps me construct a much better model of someone.
This is my attempt at part 1 and here’s my attempt at part 2.
Pre-2024
- 5th grade math teacher convinced me to give coding a try
- Learned Python, built some games and small projects.
- Got bored of programming (because I never tried to expand my abilities or do cool projects - mostly because I didn’t know that was a thing you did. I can’t help thinking how different my life would be if I had discovered the notion of hacking (as in the idea of “hacking on a project”) or Hack Club at this time.
- Got really into history and Greco-Roman mythology
- Covid hit
- First half: Only reading SFF novels and watching Crash Course World History
- Second half: Got back into programming through Harvard’s CS50
- 8th and 9th grade: (Aka the dark years) Suffered from akrasia, didn’t do much other than school, non-stop texting, and consuming trashy content (TV, youtube videos, etc)
- Discovered competitive programming → got me out of the dark ages
- Realized I was really bad at effective writing and communicating my thoughts → started a blog
- Wrote really stupid and clickbaity articles
- Randomly found an online community with some really cool (aka sparkly) people in it (reach out if you’d like to join)
- These people were not only directly cool, but being around them increased my general surface area of cool triggers by many OOMs (through the content they consumed)
- The aspiration to be as cool as them changed my identity completely
2024 and beyond
- Discovered spaced repetition systems through a chance conversation
- Discovered Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen
- Discovered the tools for thought/human-computer interaction space
- Decided I wanted to build great tools for thought
- Thought that would mean reading a lot about people working in this space (Basically wasted a month)
- Internalized that the desire to build tools for thought is a good frame of thinking, but it’s best to do it in an intrinsically meaningful context.
- Example: Jupyter Notebook is a brilliant tool for thought that most likely would never have been made by someone searching around trying to make tools for thought.
- All the people who were having success in the tools for thought domain were applying knowledge from other skills (UI design, mechanical engineering, etc)
- Internalized that the desire to build tools for thought is a good frame of thinking, but it’s best to do it in an intrinsically meaningful context.
- Thought that would mean reading a lot about people working in this space (Basically wasted a month)
- Decided I wanted to build great tools for thought
- Discovered the tools for thought/human-computer interaction space
- Discovered Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen
- Set up this place
- Spent a few months writing a lot on here
- AI
- Took fast.ai part 1
- It was really good, but I felt that it went too in-depth into a lot of topics I wasn’t interested in and didn’t go deep enough into ones that fascinated me.
- Took Andrej Karpathy’s Zero to Hero
- Realized that I now knew a lot of fundamental theory but couldn’t program much without handholding
- Currently working through Arena
- Took fast.ai part 1