The days are long, but the years are short.

Learning

You should be free to work yourself to the bone, but not to force someone else to do that for you.

The only defense against constant change is constant learning.

Thinking

  • Should ‘Enum’ be pronounced E-num as in E-number as most people do, or should it be Enum as in Enumerate?
  • We judge ourselves by our intentions but others by their actions.
  • This article gave me an idea for a practical application for NLP: we can develop chatbots to act as AI support staff given an existing technical documentation. Applications include government, legal, consumer software, etc. Note to self: prototype using spacy.io.
  • Experiencing Elixir for the first time, and it feels like a culmination of many interesting ideas I’ve come across in the past: pattern-matching from OCaml, Metaprogramming/mixins from Ruby, workers/actor model/concurrency from parallel/distributed programming class & Scala/Go, etc. Elixir is officially my new favourite language. The way its macro system is implemented is also top.
  • It’s interesting to see how Elixir’s type signature consists of a name and the function’s arity, unlike more statically typed languages.
  • I learned that tuples comes from the word ‘multiple.’
  • Metaprogramming in Elixir is well designed, and with good reason:

One of Elixir’s goals is extensibility: developers should be able to extend the language to fit any particular domain. Computer science has become such a wide field that it is impossible for a language to tackle many fields as part of its core. Rather, our best bet is to make the language extensible, so developers, companies and communities can extend the language to their relevant domains.

  • If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
  • How you live each day is how you live your life.
  • No matter how big the plate in front of you is, the only way to finish it is one bite at a time.
  • Stardew Valley is a nice homage to the old Harvest Moon titles. Another GOTY for me, alongside Undertale. Man, this past year has been full of inspiring solo indie game developer stories! I think it’s really incredible how one person worked on the pixel art, code, and music at the same time.
  • I am betting that Elixir, Phoenix, and Elm are going to be big(ger) in a year’s time.

Listening

Guitar