nithin15 – Page 2 – Nithin's Blog

Thinking through trip planning, part 3

This is the third part in a series of posts about my month of solo traveling in the fall of 2022. The prior two posts were about my planning process for creating an itinerary. In future posts, I hope to cover my trip, what went well and what didn’t, and what I would change. I also plan on discussing my West Coast trip.

So between publishing that blog post and leaving on the trip, I made some changes. I cut out the Basque Country entirely, and reallocated that time to Andalusía. My reasoning for this decision was as follows:

The weather in Andalusía was better than the weather in the Basque country around the time I was traveling
I wasn’t particularly inspired by the travel videos that I saw for the Basque Country
By cutting it out, I simplified the logistics (less planes, more trains)
I was more interested in Moorish / Islamic architecture than I was in modern Spanish culture, and by cutting out the Basque Country, I could spend more time in Andalusía
Several Redditors reassured me that there was plenty to do for the amount of time I was planning to be there

Breaking down my technical skills goals – Full-stack

Me hacking the mainframe after learning all these technical skills. Source: “Hacker Stock Photo” by devdsp is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

In this post, I talked about the three technical skills I wanted to learn: SQL, Full-stack, and QGIS. In this post, I talked about some things I’ve accomplished. Today, I’m going to break down my full-stack learning goals to hold me accountable.

Course Breakdown and Pacing

This course has 13 parts. Each part is supposed to take around 15-20 hours, or about a week. I’m working part-time until June 9th, so until then I’ll plan on doing one part a week, with a week buffer.

After June 9th, I’ll plan on doing 1.5 parts per week, since I won’t be working and will have more free time.

For Part 1 – 4, I’ll consider each section complete (and will not move onto the next section) after I’ve completed all of the non-starred exercises, as per the course instructions. For the remainder of the sections, I’ll consider a section done when I’ve done 75% of the exercises.

Based on that pacing, here’s what I should accomplish each week:

Technical skill learning update: switching to projects

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I wanted to learn three new technical skills this year. The reason I want to learn these skills is that I’ve identified roles that interest me that require these skills.

In this article, I’ll share my progress on these goals, the obstacles or I’ve faced, and some solutions I propose to address them.

Q2 Language Goal Update

In January I set some very ambitious language learning goals. I wanted to spend 120 hours this year studying 5 different languages.

By this point in the year, I should have logged 40 hours of language study. As of 1/28, I’d completed ~2 hours of study. Since then, I’ve logged 2.25 more hours of iTalki lessons, and attended two language meet-ups (~3 hours total). I’ll log an extra 2 hours of reading time.

That brings my total up to 9.25 hours. I’m more than 30 hours behind where I should be at this point in the challenge, and I don’t think I’ll meet my goal by the end of the year. In this article, I’ll talk about the obstacles I’m facing, how my understanding of myself has changed, and propose some updates to my goals to better match these changes.

Building in public: TeluguNotes.com

A few months ago, I bought a domain name called TeluguNotes.com. The vision behind this purchase was that I wanted to create high-quality resources for learning the Telugu language, geared towards heritage language learners. That is, people who might have a passive understanding of Telugu, or may be conversational in it, and want to improve their own understanding of the language.

Three technical skills I want to learn in 2023

Here are some skills I want to learn in 2023, based on the informational interviews I’ve done so far. I’ve also included resources for each of them.

SQL

What it is: programming language used to query data from relational databases

You should learn it if: you want a role that deals with data (business analyst, data analyst), or a role in which data-driven decision making is important (product analyst, strategy/operations, many consulting roles)

How to learn it: The Mode SQL tutorial came highly recommended by someone who works in data analysis.

Full-stack development

What it is: Full stack development refers to the skills needed to build modern web apps.

How to learn it: A free resource is https://fullstackopen.com/en/.

GIS

GIS refers to geographic information systems, a tool used in urban planning and environmental roles to work with spatial data.

The contacts I spoke to in the urban planning world made it seem like GIS is a good way to get an entry level role in the field, which you can use to advance within ~1-2 years.

The industry standard GIS tool is ArcGIS, but its windows only and is paid. There’s an open-source alternative (QGIS), and their tutorial is a good way to get started.

Binge-reading productivity articles: The Cut

I love reading about ways to be more productive. Here are a bunch I read from the Cut that I think others would find interesting:

Everything Always Takes Longer Than You Think
- Humans are really really bad at planning. Like, we exceed our worst case expectations bad
- This is called the planning fallacy. One solution is to use a “pre-mortem”, detailed in the next article
To Reach Your Goals, Imagine You Already Tried and Failed
- One way to get around that is to do a “pre-mortem”, pretend its some point in the future and the plan you put in place went horribly wrong – and write a retrospective detailing what happened and why
How Exercise Shapes You, Far Beyond the Gym
- Exercise is really good for you for reasons other than physical health. It can increase your ability to handle discomfort, and improve your ability to self-regulate
- Also see this podcast about dopamine, and how pain is necessary to feel pleasure
You Need a Schedule
- You need structure – a schedule gives you peace of mind through order and predictability
- People who use to-do lists get more things done, organized paper lists are better than digital or unorganized lists

2023 Goals

In this post, I covered my language goals for 2023. But I realized that I have a lot of other goals I want to pursue, so I want to outline them here.

At a high level, here’s what I want to do this year:

Plan better
Identify who I want to be and judge myself by those criteria
Have strong and healthy relationships in my life (of all kinds)
Be healthier (mentally and physically)
Do something constructive towards fighting climate change
Pursue my interests in cities and urban planning
Pursue my interests in languages, linguistics, and related topics
Make progress on a career that fits well for me
Write and publish things – ideally that are helpful to others
Read – and try to read things that expand my worldview

1:10 to Yuma

Since updating my language goals on January 3rd, I’ve made some progress:

A grand total of 1h 10mins of progress, that is. At least, that’s how much time active time I’ve spent on my Telugu studies. I have done more hours of passive work, like reading some news articles, listening to music, or watching TV in a target language (such as Spanish, French, or Telugu), but my goal is to increase the amount of active study I do. Active study is the hard stuff that pushes you outside your comfort zone and ultimately improves your ability.

Some observations I’ve made so far:

3 hours is a lot of time 🙁

To reach my goal, I would have to do between 2 – 3 hours of study a week. That’s a lot of time. It’s been nearly 4 years since I was a full-time student, which was the last time I was sitting down to really study something. It’s really hard! I forgot how hard it was. My brain hurt after 10 minutes of trying to read Telugu.

Breaking down my language goals

“Old French Road Sign” by Marcel Musil is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

In my previous post, I outlined a new set of language goals. In this post, I’ll outline my plan to reach them.

My plan was to spend 30 hours on French, Telugu, and Hindi, and 15 hours each studying Bengali and Punjabi. That totals 120 hours of studying by the end of the year.