Introspection

This is about re-assessing the problem solving approach. As we progress in our careers, we get efficient in finding solutions to daily problems. The usual paradigm becomes

1. Analyze the problem with knowledge acquired/known so far and with first principles
2. Solve the problem

All this is fine as long as the problem statements don’t vary often or remain in the same realm of complexity. If you are at a workplace wherein there are hard problems every now and then, this falls flat rather fast.

We acquire patterns and knowledge with repeating problem solving over the years. We notice people around us do the same and acquire their wisdom once in a while. That is brilliant. However our knowledge gets confined to the problems that we solved and the patterns that we saw. This happens more as we progress and we get a false satisfaction of knowing enough.

With this introspection, I realized that I didn’t spend enough time learning on

1. Continuous basis
2. During the first step of attacking any problem

Hence, I wish to re-orient my approach in my workplace or otherwise. I wish to

1. Spend 15-30% percent of time learning, refining my thoughts, re-orienting my brain continuously
2. Re-orient the problem-solving approach
   1. Learning about what others are doing (locally, peers and globally). Inspect academic texts that might be relevant. Dive-deep into other similar problems. Spend most of the time unraveling areas that I didn’t even know
   2. Analyze the problem with compounded knowledge and with first principles
   3. Solve the problem

I am sure this paradigm is intuitive to most people. Having seen my fair share of problems, I have humility in accepting that I don’t know what I don’t know many times. Sometimes it’s best to make a deliberate attempt in re-assessing ourselves

Hobby project

In line with the above, I am considering spawning a short-term to medium-term hobby project. I will build it end-to-end. I wanted to choose a project that was

1. Outside my current work domain so that I can learn and work on different things
2. Has scope of deep-diving into different areas of system design and other fields of computer science/engineering

Without falling into analysis-paralysis, I have decided to spend my time building a trading simulator. I wrote a small trading engine back in the day and it was a lot of fun. A trading simulator will be intensive in all aspects hence it might be a decent choice

Let’s see where this leads to!