Emil's Corner
about blog now uses

January 30, 2022

Life Update - January

January 2022. The year 2021 flew by fast. Feels like I just finished my undergrad, but that was in December 2020. That was over a year ago. Where did 2021 go?

2021 recap

This year was an unusual one for me. I spent the first 8 months of the year on a vacation (or maybe it's more accurate to say voluntarily unemployed). I lived from my savings and charged my batteries. My original goal was to take a 1 month vacation and then start applying for work, but I ended up taking a much longer vacation and starting my masters.

My life had a lot of ups and downs and big changes during 2018-2020. I moved 7 times during those years. I lived in 4 cities in 2 countries. I worked in different places and had a one person consulting company. I did an exchange year in Spain. So in 2021 I wanted to settle down to one place and slow down for a moment. Take a pause and reflect on my life decisions this far.

I guess the main theme was to work on myself while I recharged. I spent more time alone than ever before and it was a perfect opportunity to look inside and work on my shortcomings:

  • I have always been a workaholic and really hard on myself and that was something I worked on. Taking 8 months off was hard and forced me to take some rest and get rid of the workaholic mindset.
  • I have always also exercised rigorously, but I only worked out regularly for 2 months this year. It was hard to let go of that bodybuilder "whatever it takes" mindset, but it really helped me to let go of my ego and actually reflect on who I actually want to be. For my whole life I have been the muscular guy and stronger than most people around me. It was one of the hardest things in my life to let go of that. I never thought of it before, but I understand now how toxic and superficial that kind of a thinking is. I used to think that training and being muscular is who I am and if I lose that I lose myself. Giving up on that kind of thinking changed the way how I see life.
  • I also took that time off to think about my career. I dove deeper into Cybersec, Data Science, Machine Learning, NLP, DevOps and Backend Development.
    • I learned that Cybersec is not something I want to concentrate on, but I want that to be a part of my career.
    • Data Science is an umbrella term that I have been learning more of since 2019 and I really enjoy the topic as a whole. As an industry it is the closest to my interest. I'm that kind of a person that likes to dive deep into a topic and find the truth about it no matter how much work it takes.
    • Machine Learning is something I have learned more and more too. I like the more pragmatic engineering perspective in ML work. My lack of mathematical knowledge is a limiting factor in this field though.
    • I wrote my undergrad thesis about NLP and I still feel that I want it to be the main focus of my career. I have this weirdly strong attachment into working with text. That is why I like so much to just use the terminal too.
    • DevOps, MLOps and Data Engineering are something that I'm interested too. I really enjoy setting systems up, writing scripts, automating and optimizing workflows. This is also a strong candidate as a future career direction for me.
    • My background is in Frontend Development and now I looked more into the backend. I'm tired of working on the frontend. Making things feel and look nice doesn't feel that meaningful to me anymore. I don't feel that I'm solving important problems when doing it (looking at this website kind of shows that). Backend Development woke up the same feeling in me that Frontend Development used to do.
  • When the school started in September I focused my energy in productivity and work/life balance. I'm still struggling with this and I believe that this is something I need to proactively work on for the rest of my life. My productivity is going up almost all the time, but I'm struggling to limit the hours I work per day.

As you can see my focus was a bit all over the place during 2021. I tried a little bit of everything and fixed a little bit of everything. It's funny because although I slowed down I also ended trying more new things than ever before.

2022 plans

This year I want to limit the things I'm working on. I want to concentrate on one thing at a time (whenever that is possible). I want to take less than three topics and dive deep into those. My career interests have been a bit all over the place. My goal has always been to be a T-shaped professional, but this far I have only worked on the top part of the T. I have enough knowledge to step into a web development project, machine learning project or even a health tech project like in the capstone project in school. I have always something to give to the project, but I'm never the topic expert on anything. That is what I want to change now.

I have 3 topics that I'm concentrating on now:

  1. Rust
  2. NLP
  3. Privacy preserving AI

I'm learning Rust on my free time to get a better understanding of the basic elements of programming. Rust is used in many projects that interest me so I have a strong motivation to learn it too. I'm also investing a lot in Rust because it's fairly new language with a strong adoption so I believe that it's going to be a highly employable skill in the near future. There ain't that many Rust programmers in my area, but the demand for them is growing rapidly.

After all the studying of different topics during 2021 I decided to put all my effort into NLP. I'm going to make NLP the vertical part of my T-shaped skills. I have a fare bit of knowledge in NLP from my undergrad thesis and I really enjoyed working on the topic so I'm investing my time in school into NLP.

I wrote the Privacy preserving AI because I don't know a better name for this topic. As I've written earlier, I feel strongly about privacy and security. I want to build data-driven products, but I also want to make sure they respect the users privacy. I'm seeing more and more research about "privacy preserving AI" and "privacy preserving data science" and it makes me happy. I'm currently searching for a research topic for my masters thesis and this is the theme I want to write about. I have seen an increasing amount of papers suggesting blockchain based solutions for protecting privacy and I want to learn more about it, but I'm quite pessimistic about the whole blockchain/cryptocurrency hype still.

I used to create themes and write goals based on them for every quarter of the year, but this year I'm testing a simpler and shorter term solution. I'm writing a actionable goal for every month. For example the goal for January was "Read or write Rust code every day". That's simple, actionable and loose enough to not cause stress. I have one goal per month. That is one thing to concentrate per month. I really needed to simplify my personal goals this year, because I have so much to do in school for the rest of this academic year. I have 3 projects going on now and 2 NLP projects starting in March.

January

As I wrote, in January I concentrated on Rust code. I realized that starting to learn Rust with the Advent of Code 2021 was a bit too harsh so I ditched that for a while and started with the Rustlings. Rustlings are a great introduction to Rust language and I actually hope that every language had something similar. They start really simply, but they get gradually harder. At the moment there are 81 Rustlings in the repo and I did between 1 and 20 of them per day.

Otherwise I concentrated on my long term life vision. For the past 2 years I have just looked into the near future and I have not really had any vision about my future. After living on a student budget and stressing about money and all the bride studies etc in school I have re-learned how much I appreciate stress-free life and financial stability. I'm keeping myself open to all opportunities, but I do now that I want to do something less intense after I graduate next year. I have always dreamed of a road tripping across Europe and America or living as a nomad in Asia for a year or two. I'm might find a remote work and execute either of those dreams after school.

Terminal, Neovim & notes with Obsidian

I moved my development environment to Neovim in December and that made me much more productive. I'm not actually convinced that Vim/Neovim actually made me that much more productive itself, but the fact that there are no distractions. I always have just one file open and I navigate to next ones with Telescope. I never need to leave my editor unless I need to read documentation online or look at the changes in a web browser when doing web development. I also made my terminal transparent (used to hate transparency) and it made the terminal more calling if one can say so. It feels really cozy to work in the terminal now.

While moving my development environment to the terminal I started to recognize some shortcomings with writing all of my notes in the terminal too. In 2020 I moved from Microsoft OneNote (Only Microsoft product that I actually like) to Typora and then to Vim. I used to take really visual notes and add a lot of screenshots and diagrams to my daily notes, but that is not possible or at least it is really inconvenient in the terminal.

I decided to try Typora again, but it had become a paid product. I don't mind paying for good products, but Typora still feels really unpolished so I'm not ready to pay for it. It's important for me to keep my notes offline and in a future proof format that I can open on any computer. That limits out most of the products. I like Notion for all of it's functionality, but it's online-first and it has very limited exporting options. I also like the idea behind Roam Research, but it being an online product it was out too. I almost gave up, but then I found Obsidian. Obsidian is basically a really powerful markdown editor. It has support for inline images and Mermaid diagrams. It also implement the graph-structure that Roam has. It's not open source, but it has an open API for plugin and theme development. Editing text is not quite as fast as with Vim for me, but navigating between notes is really fast and easy with it. It also has some really nice features for daily notes and other templates.

I'm testing Obsidian as my main note-taking app for the next month. At the same time I'm testing a different workflow for my daily notes and todos. I have really liked Obsidian for now and it allows me to take more varied notes compared to the terminal workflow. I'm a bit concerned about Obsidian being a closed source project and quite early in development, but it is already so good that I would happily pay for it if it was open source. I use many closed source products, but for notes I like open source ones, because I can be 100% sure that my personal information is not being sent anywhere.

Back to blog index