Month Two
To be upfront, February wasn’t all that eventful. Most of my time was spent buried in assignments and midterm prep. On the bright side, the midterms seemed to go really well. But between snow days, gaming breaks, and reexamination of my productivity systems, there were still a few highlights work noting.
Snow Days, Reading Week, and Midterms
For only the second time in a decade (according to my CS480 prof), UW had a snow day! And not just one — we were granted (blessed?) with a partial “day off” on February 12th AND a full day without classes on February 13th!
Originally, I had two midterms scheduled for February 12th (CS482 and CS479). The CS479 midterm ended up being canceled, and instead, the weight was redistributed — making the assignments worth 40% and the final worth 60%. While this does put some pressure on scoring well on the final, I’m not complaining.
My reading week lined up with my younger brother’s, so we were both home at the same time. I took the opportunity to break my self-imposed LoL break and played some URF and SR each day. As I get older, I’m realizing that I need some kind of competitive game in my life. LoL just takes too much time. I tried TFT a few terms ago and had a blast (hit Platinum my first set and every set after), but the constantly shifting meta makes it hard to keep up by just playing the game without reading patch notes and rankings.
The week after reading week hit hard — three assignments and two midterms. While this wouldn’t have been a problem if I didn’t sleep and play some much LoL during the reading week, we all know reading week is just when I take a well-deserved break from not doing enough studying to continue not doing enough studying. Fortunately, the CS480 midterm was a 5% take-home and the CS456 midterm has a reputation for being straightforwards.
Rethinking Productivity: When Optimization Becomes a Trap
Lately, I’ve been caught in a loop of trying to centralize everything — organization, scheduling and task management. It seems like a good idea on the surface, but there’s a point where it stops being useful and just creates more friction in actually getting things done.
This becomes especially clear with my attempts to force Neovim into every aspect of my workflow. For instance, I could use something like molten.nvim to edit Jupyter Notebooks, but no amount of tweaking was every going to match the speed and ease of working in VSCode (with Vim Motions). Sometimes, the best tool for the job is just the one that works best out of the box. If I could be faster and just as capable in Neovim with Jupyter Notebooks, I would 100% use it, regardless of how long it would take to configure. The problem is that at it’s peak, it’s still worse than VSCode in this use-case.
Random Highlights
A few notable things that happened this month:
- My Hudson River Trading sweater arrived! When you make it to their final round they offer to send you some free merch. I opted for a drawstring hoodie, and the quality seriously impressed me (even my mom commented on it, so you know it’s good). Typically, company merch isn’t that great in quality.
- Visa forms are a pain. I’m still filling out paperwork for my summer co-op, and dealing with a visa for the first time has been… an experience. I totally understand why it’s designed the way it is and its necessity, but that doesn’t mean I won’t complain about the process.
- Switch back to Google Calendar and Google Tasks from Morgen. Morgen is great, don’t get me wrong, but I realized that I was only using about 10% of its features. It’s really hard to justify the cost when GCal does most of what I need for free.