Peter Norvig and Joseph Campbell

I had lunch with Peter Norvig about 18 months ago - yes, as you would imagine, he is a very cool guy - lots of fun to talk with. I just saw a link to his article "Teach Yourself to Program in 10 Years" and re-read it.

I think that his comments go way beyond programming. They remind me a lot of Joseph Campbell's advice "follow your bliss": do those things in life that you most love to do.

While I make my living designing and writing Java software, I invest a huge amount of time studying other programming languages; just in the last few years I have:
  • Studied Paul Graham's great Common Lisp books - I wrote 2 Lisp books for Springer-Verlag many years ago, but I was rusty...
  • Studied Mark Pilgrim's excellent "Dive into Python" to brush up on my Python skills
  • Learned Ruby (see my open source Ruby NLP projects on my main web site)
  • Brushed up on my Prolog skills by working through Sterling and Shapiro's "The Art of Prolog" - I used to be a Prolog guru, and I wanted to get some of my edge back
I also spend a minimum of 5 hours non-work time a week learning new Java frameworks, reading other people's Java code, articles, etc.

How do I get time for this and still have a great life? I suggest not watching TV :-)

When I talk to teenagers, I like to encourage them to follow career paths that involve doing things that they love doing - don't just try to make a lot of money.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more