The journey to plateau of productivity | 2023 Jan 15-21

I think I’m currently in the slope of enlightenment part of the gartner hype cycle.

1. Peak of inflated expectations: I made my PR to ldk-sample, which was honestly sorta easy, and felt like I was doing pretty good.
2. Trough of disillusionment: Jumping into rust-lightning, I realized I actually don’t know anything, and I need to learn a lot to become even remotely helpful to this project.
3. Slope of enlightenment: Even though it’s hard, I like what I’m doing, and I realize that as long as I keep at it, I’ll make it through. I’m starting to get in the groove of making progress and learning things, even though my actual output is rather small.
4. Plateau of productivity: at some point during or after this semester, I think I’ll be mostly onboarded, and can actually be helpful. That’s pretty much what this semester is all about.

It sort of feels like I’m doing nothing right now, i.e. I may be learning a lot each day, but I’m not making tons or PRs or leaving tons of comments/review on other PRs. I think I just have to be sort of okay with that for the time being, and I’ll gradually see my output increase as I’m able to be more helpful.

Cryptopals

Other than that, this week I completed the first set of cryptopals challenge sets. It’s been pretty fun, and has been helping me use Rust in a different, simple context.

Summer of Bitcoin

I also applied to Summer of Bitcoin, and I’ve started on the screening assignment: completing two Saylor Academy courses on Bitcoin. So far it seems pretty solid, although I ought to spend more time on them each day to finish within the two week time-frame.

Schedule

Something I’ve noticed as I’m starting my semester is how fragmented my schedule is. Even without classes I feel like I’m interrupting my work to go places and whatnot. I’ve naturally converged to working from 3 or 4pm into the nighttime, however this doesn’t bode well for social activities. This past week, I maybe only got 4 decent workdays, because if I ever had anything in the evening, it’d break up my work and make it more difficult.

Also have noticed my tendency to try to get all the small things out of the way so I can really focus on the my main work in a day, but that really just ends up unnecessarily delaying my actual work.

Going to start waking up a bit earlier and starting the day with my main work and seeing how that goes.