Author: karanparikh

Goal Tracking: March Edition

At the beginning of the year I published a post outlining what some of my goals for the year were. In the spirit of being transparent, here is the progress I made on them over the course of March –

  1. ~3.5 hours of volunteering at the Family Dog Rescue with a friend of mine who volunteers there every Sunday. When I move to San Francisco I shall do the same.

    Princess, one of the best dogs I've ever met.
    Princess
  2. Zero shyness. Still need to decide if that’s a good thing or not haha.
  3. No progress made on learning Rust or Erlang.
  4. 3 books read — Station Eleven (loved it; extremely well written and engaging, and not what you’d expect from a novel set, for the most part (the narrative jumps back and forth in time), in a post apocalyptic world), Before Watchmen: Comedian/Rorschach (picked it up while looking at apartments in SF; I enjoyed it. But then again, I’m a massive Watchmen fan), and Death of Wolverine (1/2 of a birthday gift from a close friend of mine. Thank you! It’s a fun read, though I wish it had been longer).
  5. Instead of reading 2 research papers this month I’d decided to read The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Volume 1 instead. Failed terribly at this endeavor unfortunately. Only managed to read one chapter 😦
  6. 8 blog posts.
  7. Zero muscle ups.

Scary

“Before I go” (make sure to watch the video as well) is an essay by Paul Kalanithi in which he talks about life, time, and cancer. It’s one of the most beautiful and touching essays I’ve read in recent times. It made me think about the inexorable forward march of time and the inherent fragility of human health. I think that’s really scary – we cannot really do anything about either of those things. All we can hope to do is live life in such a manner that when (not if) our time comes we realize that every moment leading up to now isn’t a flat line of points, but rather a gorgeous valley of peaks and troughs.

Building a building

Instead of reading two research papers for the month of March I’ve decided instead to read as much as possible (yes I know that’s not a measurable quantity) of The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Volume 1. I’d read the LLVM and HDFS chapters in the past and was blown away but how well written they were. I’m pretty excited to read the rest of the book.