Around the world in 58 hours

end of break, assorted thoughts

Post created: 2018-03-15

Break is almost over and soon I'll embark on another 50+ hour trip.

Things that should have happened:

finish my homework
write some notes
figure out how schemas work

Things that happened:

walked into a tree
pupper's farts are death
sent a chicken to heaven

Disjoint sets. Whoops.

Talked to a stranger the other day and it brought back some memories.

Technology in general suffers from a marketing problem in this part of the world. Still viewed primarily as a cost center, rather than a resource in its own right. Plenty of room for it to be applied, but nontrivial effort is required to convince people to let you.

So I suppose it isn't too unreasonable that the only career path that they view as viable is teaching, i.e. you go to university to learn about CS, you come back and teach CS. That's a perfectly legitimate career - one of my top choices currently, honestly - but that viewpoint discards so much potential for improvement.

In related news, planned a schedule on Stellic (why does it have live chat??) and thought more about what I'd like to focus on.

On carving out a niche: "like a focused laser beam" was part of what convinced me to apply ED to CMU. I related and still relate quite a lot to that.

I would like to branch out into different fields and subfields, but realistically, I'm not capable enough for that right now.

So instead, of my main interests:

ML (take the masters sequence?)
PL (go full 312 family)
systems (I could technically take every systems course)
theory/math (some of the algo courses sound pretty interesting)

I'll need to pick one.

I'm currently leaning towards systems, but that could change.

And whither then? I cannot say.