Today
After months of often forgetting which day it is, it’s a strange feeling to say, it’s Friday! Fridays at RC hit different than Fridays of gainful corporate employment. Nonetheless, I am looking forward to having even less structure to my days for the next two days and catching up on exercise. I had my first coffee chat today and something I mention in that chat is how RC has affected my total exercise volume for the worse.
My wife and I take “shifts” as primary caregiver during the day, which gives the other space to exercise and do other things for themselves. I’ve had much more time to exercise than ever in the past couple months since my daughter started napping independently. I can pretty confidently say that I’ve felt better than I ever have with regards to my strength and aerobic conditioning. But the time I dedicate to RC in addition to childcare means I have much less time to exercise than before. I’m somewhat disappointed by this, but it’s a good reminder that you can’t do everything optimally all at once. I’ve explicitly chosen to prioritize my daughter and RC at this time in my life and so I should not be hard on myself regarding exercise. Nonetheless, I did buy a treadmill to put under my desk to just get additional movement throughout the day - I’m excited to see what effect this has! Apologies if you see my head bobbing during calls and if you can hear it running in the background while I talk. Please feel free to tell me to stop if it is distracting as well! I will be more than happy to oblige.
Calls and Chats
As I mentioned above, I had my first coffee chat today. It was delightful! I’m always a bit cautious about how much time I spend meeting-and-greeting since I find it pretty draining, but I want to explicitly make time for this in the early days of RC. It actually was not even that draining! I think I might be over-indexing on these sorts of coffee chats in a corporate environment but doing them at RC has a different feel.
I had two other calls today - one workshop about building my volitional muscles and another about AI safety. The workshop about building your volitional muscles was really great. I knew deep down that a many of the things I wanted to work on were motivated by something other curiosity (job stuff, hype/status/prestige). Being honest with yourself about this is hard, and even then there are probably still some things on my life which I wasn’t 100% honest about, but it’s a great skill to hone throughout your whole life. I had 17 things on my list that I could potentially work on at RC and I eliminated 10 of them. I’m going to try and get this down such that I only have 2-3 things “in-progress” by the end of next week!
The AI Safety chat was interesting as well. Although the topic was interesting, The thing I appreciated the most was the expert ability of the presenter to lay out the field of AI Safety so clearly. They also were prepared for every question that was asked and offered supplemental reading and follow-up presentations.
Compiler Work
After days of saying that I would continue work on my Monkey compiler I finally got to it again. Right at the end of my day I got all my tests passing for function calls. To be concrete, I have a compiler which can generate bytecode for the following code and a VM that can execute the bytecode:
let globalNum = 10;
let sum = fn(a, b) {
let c = a + b; c + globalNum;
};
let outer = fn() {
sum(1, 2) + sum(3, 4) + globalNum;
};
outer() + globalNum; // returns 50
I was able implement this without reading the chapter in the book which also felt good. Granted, I did follow a lot of the setup/theory from the book for almost everything else. But nonetheless I think there is some signal that I understand the material well-enough. One day I’d like to re-implement everything in another language with minimal references to the book, but that probably won’t be at RC this time (volitional muscles ✅).
Fin
I mentioned yesterday that I wanted to continue to work on my compiler to get build some momentum that I lost yesterday. I think I achieved that. Together with the progress I made on my compiler in addition to saying no to many things during the volitional muscles workshop, I feel in a much better place going into next week.
Next Monday
- 1 coffee chat
- At least one pairing session
- Make more progress on compiler
- See if anyone is interested in getting into nand2tetris with the same level of intensity of ARENA?
- If there is interest, I might drop ARENA for this? I’m subtly hoping that someone who does ARENA this time around will run it again 6 weeks from now when I feel like I’ll know more about whether I actually want to do it