2020 — A New Beginning

It’s the new year again. Plans get made this day and forgotten the next week. So I have never really done “New Year Resolutions” kinda deal. But last night, a random video showed up on my youtube recommendation. After watching it, I must say I was very inspired.

Once in a while, youtube will recommend some hidden gems, and this video was one of them. The video is about studying, meditation, taking actions and producing. I thought the guy in the video, Dr.Alok Kanojia, a psychiatrist from Harvard, was bullshiting at first. But few minutes in, I felt I could relate to what he’s talking about. He described some common issues with gamers, “gamers become very analytical because that’s how they get good at playing games. but because they are always in a pre-defined game world, mostly doing analytical activities, they lose their creative muscle”. That makes a lot of sense, and I believe this is also applicable to programmers. I would love to make games, but every time I try to design something, my analytical mind takes over and starts criticizing every single bit of the design decisions that I could come up with. So I always end up getting stuck on the design and distracted by pure technical work, like developing lower-level systems.

So how do we fix this? Dr.Alok said, “to train your creative muscle, you need to start producing things. Whatever it is, just make it happen. Start small like writing a paragraph every day. Even if it’s the shittest paragraph, just do it. You need to ignore the result and just focus on pulling through. Your mind will come up with anything to convince you to just jerk off instead of getting someone actually pregnant.” LOL!

So that’s what I doing. Not the getting someone pregnant part, but writing. I will document all of my studies as much as I can. I dug up all my old drafts and already put them out there. I will start documenting all the things I’ve been looking into for the past few months, like coroutines, reflection, type safety, thread safety, cache coherency, intrinsics, rust, go…

I’m excited for the new year, specifically for all the new things I’ll learn, new people I’ll meet, new projects I’ll work on, and the new games that are gonna come out.

Originally published at https://dylanyasen.github.io on January 1, 2020.