Life

So I am an entrepreneur now. And I turned 41 last week. Despite all this, the year has been extremely eventful. We took two vacations, I attended two conferences; presented in one, my wife found a good position that challenges her and gives her the space to grow, my son completed a year learning to play the drums, finished level 1 of swimming. Not all was bright though: I got covid twice this year; my immunity seems to be in a terrible place, i've been dealing with a variety of stuff with my body - results of not taking enough time to exercise in my twenties are showing now....

Rest In Peace Manoj. I will miss you. I keep thinking I should have made some time to meet you - either here in Singapore or back home in Chennai. I think we met in the second year. And I don't think we hit it off all that much, though. We became friends much later, though, if I recollect right. I knew you wanted to be a pilot back then....

2022 was a lot of ups and downs. Its the year we traveled to meet our families after 2 years of lockdowns and restrictions. Its also the year we got vaccinated for COVID. And still got COVID anyway. Its the year I spent learning ROS. Its the year I almost shipped my side-project. Almost. Its also the year we decided that our impermanence in life is probably a good thing....

Earlier this year, we all got our booster doses and were eligible for traveling. And the situation also seemed to ease a bit after the initial Omicron wave here in S'pore and in India as well. So we took a quick 2-week trip to Chennai in March. Flights were empty, airports were empty and the whole experience was so chilled out. Am getting ahead of myself. Let me just look at how the year has fared so far....

2021 was not the best year I've been through, going by how tough things got for me - personally and professionally. But it is highly likely that this is the year that taught me the most about every aspect of myself, my life, my aspirations and motivations. Instead of pouring over everything that went wrong, am just going to reflect on the learnings and see what I can do better for the next year....

For the longest time in my life, I have wanted to learn meditation. People always made it sound so mystical and so powerful, that I wanted to have my share of it too. At least, that’s how the fad for meditation started. I remember trying to meditate as early as my mid-twenties in 2006-2007. My mom could meditate but she never made it sound like anything special. My maternal grandfather was so good at it that we always thought he was asleep sitting....

I’ll be 40 in a year or two. I distinctly remember feeling a stomach churn and completely unprepared when I turned 30. I had just finished my MS thesis and joined Atheros. I had a long way to go to have something I could call a career. It was very unsettling at that time. But then things happened and here I am, almost ten years later, still embarked on a journey to identify the problems I really want to solve....

Even at the cost of annoying folks around me, I’d dare say that 2020 has actually been a fabulous year for me, personally. I learnt quite a bit about myself, learnt a couple of new skills, learnt what I don’t like, what I don’t want to do, fixed a couple of things about my health and more. I’ll try to chronicle these for the rest of the post. I typically consider my date of birth as the beginning of another year....

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....

I am terrible at taking notes. I guess I never learnt the skill properly. Until two days back, I had 6 note taking apps on my device, each having a copy of all the projects I am working on, status, todo list (unchecked), and thoughts and action items for each. Each of these has some overlap, so they aren’t imported around. I spent last morning cleaning up every one of them, copying them to two main tools and deleting every thing else....