Learnings From Today


Today I did my finances (made a spreadsheet for my holdings and cash flow) so that I would not run out of money this summer, since I will be working at an AeroAstro-style company (and as I'm sure you've heard, they all pay dog shit... I guess that's what you get for going for the "wow rockets" job I guess). In the process I learned some nifty

I do want to start reflecting on life, but I honestly do not have a burning depressing tale to tell. I will say one thing though (and talking to my mom has actually helped me remember): the job rat race is a cancer to your academic progression (and general intellectual improvement). It is true that the interviews (technical) can help you practice skills, but the raw logistics of scheduling like 30 interviews over the span of 1-2 months (as I did for 2-3 years in a row) is very taxing and gains you very little. I do not recommend it. Instead, it's worth to take the chance on few companies and practice a lot, a lot, a lot. It will make you better. I felt compelled to get a good job early on and this led me to make irrational decisions. When shame is involved and there is nothing you can do immediately, it's hard to make the right long-term decision and defer a potential (but false... it's a red herring) "fix" of sorts. Applying to more jobs seems like that fix but it's not: it just taxes you. To anyone going into college, I'd say the most important thing is focus. If you have something you love, great! Otherwise, maybe try to do things in sequence with an exploration plan. Get good at things and don't just do them in parallel because you'll be overwhelmed and not learn as well, not improve as much, etc. Exploration is good, but exploitation is something that I've underrated. Don't make this mistake.

Today I also learned some things about bash while trying to get GDB to work on my mac, which involved some codesigning and other nonsense. It still didn't work because of (probably) a bug related to a wait4 call in the darwin source code (which I'm going to try to modify next), but whatever, here is what I learned:

When I get a chance I'll upgrade this site to have code-like code embeddings so that you can read it more nicely.