Learning

A couple of years back, our investment advisor got us an invite to take a personality test from Gallup. It was part of a seminar/workshop that we signed up. This was one of the first such test I took so far. I’ve taken a handful since. This post is largely going to just talk about my experience with these tests and their findings. I remember taking psychometry tests as part of the placement process back in the day. I usually tried to game the tests. In the sense, I’d align my answers to what I thought presented my best persona. I didn’t quite think if the tests were game proof. I didn’t try to be truthful either. It didn’t matter to me. Besides, in your early twenties you are more keen on getting your way than getting it right ;-) ...

Late bloomer is a term often associated with developmental milestones in kids. It turns out the actual meaning is a lot more generous than that, despite what Urban Dictionary has to say on the topic. I always topped my class in school. Even through undergrad classes, I stayed in the top 5 ranks. So, “late bloomer” is not a term that anyone would associate with me. Frankly, I haven’t considered the possibility until very recently. I did well in most of what I took up doing. And if you look at my career path, I’ve dabbled with a lot of technologies across the spectrum. I mean, does anyone even remember SSI clustering anymore? Until recently, I even had a google alert setup for “Mosix clustering” - if you even remember something like that in the first place. Just out of college, I had the opportunity to setup both SSI cluster as well as a Mosix cluster :-). So to say, that I had the opportunities and then I had the capability to pick up on those opportunities is somewhat humble. So where is this thought of a “late bloomer” even figuring in all this? ...

I recently finished a course on Coursera. Machine Learning from Andrew Ng. Its been on my radar for the longest time and after several false starts, I finally completed mid last month. But along the way I learnt two things: I still relish math like I always did. I understood the concepts pretty well and am able to come up with correct solutions. I am somewhat terrible at coding them up. Now that’s a big surprise to me. I’ve been writing code for quite a long time now. After learning half a dozen programming languages and spending almost a decade writing code, it is a bit of a shock that I find it somewhat difficult to code up the algorithms. And especially in Octave/Matlab. I got thinking. I have built an entire application with all its shenanigans using python. I have been running it on AWS for at least 2 years now and I haven’t so much as contacted their support for anything other than increasing limits. And yet, here I am unable to code up a simple nested for loop to implement a linear regression model. I realised the problem to be, again, two-fold. ...

Twelfth standard math was hard. We didn’t have a stable teacher all through eleven and for beginning terms of twelve. Whoever took over math usually left within the year, although for no particular reason. Most of the class went to external tuitions for math. It was all the more critical because we had to clear a separate competitive examination for engineering admissions. Aral Mani’s near my house was the most famous of all. A few people went to a more comprehensive coaching program somewhere near Pallavaram. This place did twelfth coaching as well as prep classes for the entrance examinations. ...

I am a paranoid guy. But my paranoia borders on a potential disorder. I am paranoid about things that might not even happen. For example, I always worry that I cannot do great work. My fear is not about failing, though. My concern is that someone will dig up something I said on my twitter feed that I can’t entirely agree with today. Is that rational? But when has fear been reasonable? ...

I have been writing web applications for quite a while now. For a more significant part of this experience, I had been developing on top of an existing CMS type environment; moodle, drupal, WordPress, or the like. Very few of these are web applications written from scratch. I typically used PHP when I write for the web because it has the lowest barrier of entry. You can write HTML and then insert your PHP wherever you need dynamic content. I used to hate Javascript, which in turn meant I was not too fond of Ajax calls. So my web applications always submitted forms and handled the details in PHP. ...

I can vividly remember the setting. It was only the two of us in the classroom. Right after a lecture on Spread Spectrum Modulation (and the associated theory). This friend of mine, B, had a few questions on the lecture but wouldn’t ask the lecturer. For some reason, he believed I might be able to help. In college, I was pretty egoistic. So clearly, I would help. I sat there explaining the theory to him, explaining the math as I understood it. It was an ecstasic moment. I could hear myself thinking ahead and could visualize the theory unfold in my head. After a point, I was explaining it as the understanding happened a few ms ahead of my speaking inside my moment. It was pure joy, a very first time I experienced this brilliance. I called it my “aha” moment. From that point on, I have purely running behind these moments. And have had them all through my learning and mind you, I am not done learning anytime soon. Though the topics that I go aha over today are vastly different from those that I did in college. ...

I have fancied publish-subscribe middleware(pubsub) architectures for quite sometime. When we were still very new in CTS, I came up with a wild suggestion to try this for getting a data dump from a legacy system into our moodle instance. I was quite clueless about what this would entail in terms of development effort, but I could create a PoC setup within a few days which made me quite confident of being able to pull this off. ...