It's been a while since I last wrote about what I'm working on. My work at Amazon has been taking most of my time, especially over the past year. Other than that, I branched out into mind-hacking for a while which was fun, albeit a bit dangerous at times if you don't "mark the trees" to retrace your path back.
I've been really getting back into programming in C and server-side Javascript, which happen to be my two favorite languages, so I'm happy to get back the focus of being able to sit for, say, 6 straight hours and just write code and design things. You lose that a bit working at big companies where there's a lot of randomization, and less opportunities to write multiple versions of the same thing to pick the best approach, due to shipping dates committed to by a much larger group of people. But you accomplish way more because you can move faster without necessarily sacrificing quality. My biggest learning from Amazon as a developer I'd say would be the use of libraries for not writing everything from scratch. BTW on the topic of server-side Javascript - NodeJS, npm and CommonJS have really matured a great deal since I last lurked in the CommonJS mailing lists in 2009, and that's a great step ahead for Javascript becoming a language of preferred choice.
In terms of personal projects, I've been playing around with writing a neural network (to use the term loosely) that spans multiple EC2 instances, where nodes run as individual processes that can probabilistically fork and communicate with each other. I stumbled upon the Oculus Rift while working on that, since I needed a set of VR glasses to visualize the neural network in 3D, and it was insane! I haven't used VR glasses before, but if you look past the lens-magnified pixels and blur, the feeling of being present elsewhere was very very good. At $300 for the developer kit, I think it is well worth the money. I don't care too much for the Facebook acquisition, since I highly doubt Mark Zuckerberg sees Facebook as just a social network and would be surprised if the social aspects get kludged into a VR headset. The raw number of possibilities with the Rift is so immense that there is interesting stuff for everyone, beyond just repurposing a social network to work in 3D with head-tracking. Good protection against Sony's muscle, is my best guess.
I've restarted my study of Physics, and I hope to research alternatives to rocket propulsion this year in my spare time. I still don't have the money required to make this more than a hobby, but I'm an optimist and hope I can fund this interest at some point in my life. I'm currently taking classes for Muay Thai and Boxing, which is the hardest I've pushed my body and is really fun. I think I should learn driving at some point too, which is ironic for a guy with dreams of traveling to space. I spent many months last year teaching myself improvisational guitar playing, especially with scales and modes for playing solos, and combining different influences from a really wide range of bands from the world. It's a really good way to relax, and I continue to believe that everyone in the world should learn an instrument to play music on.
I hope to post more frequently in the coming months with what I'm working on.
Until next time
6 comments:
Nice to see what you are up to these days. NodeJs is pretty cool btw. :D
Nice to see what you are up to these days. NodeJs is pretty cool btw. :D
It's always refreshing to read good stuffs, esp. on web. Got to read your write up for the first time, and I am curios to read other stuffs written in past.
Your interest in space is surprise to me; did not know about it in past.
Good read. I wish you the best for
1. Muay Thai and Boxing
2. Guitar
3. Travel in Space
Btw, what is Muay Thai and Boxing and how it is better/ different from other techniques?
good to see you back ... btw what was flare all about? any views on neural nets?i mean where is our technology going ?
and hey are going to write about all that mind hack stuff ??
@Sindhura - thanks! :) Sorry, I have comment moderation on which explains why your first comment didn't show up immediately. Had problems with spam in the past.
@Anubhav - As far as I can tell, boxing is about punches and dodges, while Muay Thai is closer to kickboxing, which combines boxing with close-quarter kicks. These are pure fighting arts requiring really intense body fitness. The major difference I've seen is in the emphasis on mind in other art-forms like Karate, Taekwondo and Aikido. I personally prefer there being a balance in mind and body when learning fighting arts, but at the moment I felt I needed a pure fighting art.
@AjaX - Flare evolved over the 10 months of development, starting as a cloud-based operating system providing 'device drivers' for web services like Facebook, Blogger, Email, Twitter, Maps etc as a common developer API. This enabled developers to build complex applications combining all these services that run on the cloud-based operating system. Our initial prototype gave people access to the OS via a browser-based desktop, and a bunch of apps that we had written.
Over time, we started narrowing our focus to becoming purely an application hosting platform exposing the common developer API, allowing apps developed using this to be embeddable on 3rd party websites, or your own sites, or as desktop apps etc.
I think a dedicated post on my neural network project is going to happen soon. It's a very interesting space given the enormous computing power that we have available with things like EC2 at really low costs. I had this crazy idea of building an electron accelerator using EC2 once ;)
Mind hack, maybe.
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