Looking back on the goals I set in January, how are things going? Pretty well! It's been remarkably healing to catch up on life and create some distance as I prepare for the next chapter of my career.
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Writing and art. I've written about 30,000 words on my Freewrite word processor device, making writing into a near-daily habit. I'm excited to say that my very first D&D adventure has reached a complete first draft (8000 words) and is ready to be play-tested a few different groups of my friends! While the playtesting and refinement is going on, I've started dabbling a bit in creating some original art (see below) that I can include in the final publication. The other 20,000 words written were for a daily event I signed up for, Flash Fiction February, which required writing a ~400 word short story each and every day of that month. I managed to write 28 tiny stories, most of them as 'backstory' for the D&D adventure -- so it was a good dovetailing exercise! My big takeaway is that I have a new respect for people who write fiction. I've spent my life writing non-fiction (technical books), and that's never been difficult for me: I know something, and now I just have to explain it well. But fiction? Who knows what to even talk about? It's hard to make up imaginary things, much less make them interesting!
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Music. No real progress yet, though I've sold off of couple more physical synthesizer devices and started experimenting with new music software in preparation for uh... finishing writing some pieces. Soon.
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Japanese. Daily progress continues. My study partner and I are now halfway through the JLPT N4 textbook, and I crossed a magical threshold recently. It used to be that when I listened to Japanese media (movies, TV shows, podcasts), it would just sound a blur of random syllables. But somehow the "parser" portion of my brain just kicked in: now I heard a stream of words when I listen. I can hear each word, and the division between them! I only know about half of the words, and I can't nearly translate them fast enough to understand the whole stream, but still it feels like a remarkable change.
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Machine Learning. I've started watching lots of videos going over the basics of neural networks: how weights and backpropogation work exactly, recurrency, and so on. My realization is mostly, "hey I remember learning all this back in the 90s" -- this theory hasn't changed, it's just that computers are finally fast enough to have networks with billions of parameters! Of course there are new concepts as well, such as Attention and Transformers... so I'm looking forward to playing with those things soon.
Of course, there's also been a long, slow-running undercurrent of "looking for my next job." I told myself not to explicitly go job-hunting for the first few months, but it's hard to ignore opportunities and networking when they come knocking on my door every week or two. While I haven't made any real decisions, I'm slowly leaning toward public service. I took a short trip to DC and met with several Federal CTO/CIO to understand the sort of work they're doing, and why it's so satisfying (and simultaneously frustrating.) I've been having coffee with various leaders who have made the transition from Silicon Valley to government, in order to learn what their journey has been like. I've already read Cyd Harrell's excellent book about civic tech, and now I'm reading Jen Palka's recently-published Recoding America, which is exactly as crazy as I expected.
published March 21, 2024