September 17, 2022

Lately

Have I really last written in February? I felt that monthly updates became a bit boring because there was not much happening in my life. I also meant to instead write some technical blog posts, but life happened and I forgot the whole blog writing.

School & work

School semester ended gracefully. I did get quite stressed and almost burned out in the end. I managed to get most of my bridge studies done though and only have two more to go next year.

As I was drowning in school work I also did an internship at the university's language technology lab and now continued as a full-time research assistant there working on information retrieval style tasks. It has been really interesting so far. I have trained some models on machine translated data and also built vector based search engines/databases for some of our projects. I have grown more interested into the implementation of these engines as I have learned the pros and cons of the ready-made implementations like Weaviate and other similar ones.

Rust & Go -> System & Platform programming

I have continued to learn Rust, but I had to put it on the background with all the things I'm required to learn at work and in school. I did instead take a quick dive into Go as I was debugging Weaviate (it's built with Go). Go seems like a really nice language and I kind of hope to replace Python with it someday. It's not really solving the same problems as Rust, but it has many similar use cases and I'm hoping for these two to be my go-to languages for most cases in the future. I kind of see Go where you would otherwise use Java or Python and Rust where you would otherwise use C or C++.

Learning about these languages and learning about the implementations of different search engines and databases has ignited in me a deep curiosity towards system and platform programming. I'm currently reading "The Linux Programming Interface" and I'm thinking about buying some other Unix/Linux system/kernel programming books. It really puts Rust into perspective when reading about the reasons C is used in the kernel development and what the main problems it brings along. I'm not sure if I'm interested in system programming as a career, but it is definitely an area that I want to dive deeper into.

Change in perspective

While I was drowning in school work and trying to work and fulfill personal goals all at the same time I realised that it's time to slow down a bit and put things into perspective. I was treating every part of my life as something that needs to get done. In my head my personal goals were just as important as working or school. I was trying to give all of those 100% of my energy and focus. Now you don't need to be that good in math to realise that it's not possible to maintain that kind of an attitude. That's why I changed my perspective on these main areas of my life. I have one academic year of school left so it should be my main priority now. Once it's done, I will have many hours per week more to use on my personal goals. Second in the list is work because it gives me experience and keep the roof on top of my head at the moment. Third in the list comes personal goals like learning Rust and system programming etc. I have time and energy for those when school is over and some day those things might pay my bills too if that seems like something I want to pursue.

Other things

I'm always using myself as a lab rat for my human experiments. I have done many experiments during this year, but the most important ones have proved to be cutting down on carbs and total calories. I gained some weight during the spring and I have been slowly losing them now and working on my cardio health together with gym training. It has changed the way my body feels and how much energy I have every day.

I also cut down on alcohol usage and combined that with less news reading and more meditation. This made a clear difference with how my mind behaves. It feels like my mind was really or foggy for the first 7 months of this year, but now it's always clear and focused. I have not had problems focusing since I started meditating. The same thing happens every time I start meditating, but then I stop at some point because I forget how big of a difference meditation does.

I'm planning on writing about some blog posts about topics that have hovered my mind lately, but I will probably not continue with the monthly life updates. I will write updates when something interesting happens.

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