2021 into 2022 - A Year in Review

life learning

01 Jan 2022

18 minute read

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Table of Contents #

This post is a sequel to last year’s post, my recap of 2020.

If you want to talk to me about any of this, chat, email, or have any recommendations on anything, email me or DM me on Twitter.

Doing yearly recaps helps me observe my progression in many areas, and keeps me accountable for next year. I share things I’ve done, learned, read, and often sprinkle in some introspection on recurring motifs that have animated my year. I also included a best of twitter.

Like last year, I also include miscellaneous content recommendations, and a recap of changes to my to my public wiki.

Learning / Knowledge #

Note: I’m tracking what I learned this year by simply looking at the version control of my personal knowledge base.

In this section I explain what I learned, what I planned on learning, and also made a little recap of some new additions. This is a general overview of ideas and subjects that I’ll develop in other sections.

What I wanted to learn #

From last year’s post (grade out of 10 for my progress):

Get better at:

Learn more about:

What I’ve learned #

What I want to learn #

This is intended to be a list of things I want to learn, and I know I won’t do many of them.

Projects #

What I wanted to do #

From last year’s post (grades on how well I did):

What I did #

Archivy #

Archivy - my open source knowledge base software focused on customization, good search and integration with the web, has progressed well, and most notably:

I worked on a few new plugins:

Also improved the following ones:

Archivy is also now on the AUR and in NixPkgs.

In terms of open source community, I’ve been very happy about contributions and especially appreciated @edditler’s help, and @clemux’s support.

Espial #

Espial is an English word that means discovery.

I have been working (in private, for now) on a project named Espial, to enhance and augment organization in knowledge management software, using Natural Language Processing. I have a blog post on the way about this, but in the meantime, here’s some of the stuff I’ve shared online:

There’s also this thread, where I downloaded all of the articles I had liked and asked people to give me links they had read. For each link, I fed it into Espial and then combed through the results to see if it found similar, relevant posts, which I then shared. (Spoiler: It worked!):

Other Projects #

Made a discord bot analytics platform, dabbled in synaesthesia with a project to combine poetry and music, worked a bit on AdiosCorona (illustrated articles on the COVID pandemic), and thought about decentralized content discovery.

What I want to build / do #

Writing #

I published 6 blog posts this year, for a total of ~8k words, compared to ~11k in 2020 and ~9k in 2019. I have way too many drafts I didn’t publish for lack of time / direction, and a lot of my content is just posted on my wiki, where I’m less stringent on producing good content. I need to fix this, and have some posts that are ready to publish.

Thanks to @kewbish for giving me feedback on what I have been writing.

What I wanted to write #

From last year’s post:

What I wrote #

What I want to write #

Other Goals #

Past #

Last year’s post:

I’d like to do some more climbing and see some of my close friends I’ve never met in real life (if covid allows). (no climbing, but lots of hiking and running, and I did see one!)

I’m also hoping to obtain an internship this summer (in research or industry), which should be a fun and educative experience if everything pans out. (nope, did other fun stuff)

I look forward to also getting into writing poetry as a creative outlet, as I really enjoy producing the odd poem here and there. (did this + lots of private ones)

Goals for 2022 #

Miscellaneous #

Twitter #

I started actually using the twitter account I had created in June 2020. Twitter can be a very high-value social space, but I need to be careful not to overdo it or procrastinate. Have been meeting and talking with cool people, like judah. I wrote ~400 tweets.

I tried predicting how many followers / following I’d have in a year. As of writing this, I am at 106 followers and am following 305 accounts. I’m 95% confident I’ll have between 140-5K followers next year, and 50% confident I’ll have between 200-900. These predictions are just fun, I don’t care much about this metric.

My “best” tweets: #

Camps Attended #

SPEAR - Summer Program in Experiential and Applied Reasoning #

This program is similar to SPARC. I met some amazing and kind people. Gavin Leech and Chana Messinger actually pushed me to start Espial! SPEAR had similar effects on me as the Google Code-in community (described in last year’s post): expanding my knowledge / belief in what I could do and what was possible. I was exposed to many different interesting communities, like the effective altruists focused on how to best improve the world, and the rationalist / longtermist communities.

Mathematical Summer in Paris #

Mathematical Summer in Paris was a great experience - it’s a week-long, international camp for 16-20yr olds, and its focus is higher mathematics. I learned TONS at this event, although it was more breadth than depth. Notes are here. Especially liked the talk on different types of geometry entitled “On a woodcut by MC Escher”, by Yves Saint Aubin. Great talks on cryptography, Diophantine equations, persistence theory and quiver representations (this was confusing but amazing), and Natural Language Processing. If I can, I want to do this next summer.

Random lists and updates to my knowledge base (articles, quotes, words, etc…) #

Books read #

Non-Fiction #

Fiction #

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