2013

One, January 1st 12:00 AM EST DST is dumb. My New Years is now the Winter Solstice at 0:00 GMT.

I have three major objectives this year:

1. Get a job in my industry. After 6 months I haven't found anything, but I will press on. I'm really starting to lean towards freelancing because I really don't want to be locked into a 40 hour a week job. That is so much of my time that I would rather spend working on my own projects and learning.
2. Get active in some project. Probably KDE, but I want it somewhere in the complete package Linux stack. I'm not going to try to reinvent the wheel by forking what other people have done and letting it atrophy out in obscurity, I'm going to engage with persistent projects to make them better. It is the only way to get the desktop metaphor mature.
3. Tear down my mother's old house. She pays it off this year, and the main motivator for me not going 12 hours a day job hunting is that I don't want to move out just to have to come back in a few weeks or months to help move everything out and tear the thing down. But it has to be done, this is the year to do it, I'll see it through to fruition.

 Thinking back to 2012, I learned more in 6 months out of college than I did in 18 years of schooling, sans my senior year of High School, when I had plenty of time to read wikipedia and took a bunch of actually informative AP courses. My knowledge density of practical things increases exponentially when I'm doing self research. I am, however, dissatisfied that I didn't document my insights better or archive my coding appropriately.

 I graduated. I think college is overpriced garbage for credentials that become meaningless when everyone and their mother with money can just toss them out lackadaisically. It is an outdated education model in an era when we can engage with knowledge at an infinite level through instantaneous ubiquitous unlimited communication through networks. In college, here is my take away on a per semester basis in college in my major:

• Freshman 1: Writing functions, very basic data types, Monte Hall problem.
• Freshman 2: Object orientation, static types, basic containers, big O.
• Sophomore 1: Stack overflows, basic assembly, more containers, testing.
• Sophomore 2: Design patterns, C, Swing, threading in Java.
• Junior 1: Basic kernel concepts, how shells and pipes work.
• Junior 2: Data visualization algorithms, openMP, source control.

Since I graduated, I learned C++11, lambdas, move semantics, templates, how compilers behave, shell script, Python3, Regular Expressions, encryption, a bunch of Mono, Javascript in entirety, how to write Json, how web servers work, a truck load of Linux sysadmin tools when building computers and learning Arch, and basic html and css.

I really feel that a lecture environment stifles creativity and specialization to a fault. It limits the students to the views of the teacher, and they have the time commitment of the total student body split between those professors. And I had small class sizes. My largest CS class was by far CS1, and since then the most students in one course was AI with like ~20 students. The average was 10. I can't fault my professors, they put in the effort. They also were teaching computer science, which is mostly the theory of computation, and it isn't directly applicable to the field.

But that is the problem. The theory is great, but we aren't living in times of leisure and excess, we are losing that at a tremendous rate. We don't have the money to blow on these 4 year degrees that don't teach anything essential to livelihood. I don't feel inherently enlightened by going to college, I was self-teaching myself astronomy and physics my last two years of high school. I learned about Quarks, Neutron Stars, the fundamental forces, and such through wikipedia. I learned C++ from the cppreference that I have been contributing to. Teaching yourself what you  want to know is more possible and easier than ever before, and it needs to take hold in culture as the way to learn, because it is the only way to truly learn and enjoy it. At least for me, and anyone like me. Maybe someone likes the lectures, the tangential topics, the boring information digesting. I didn't, and I look forward to the future.

I don't think there will be any dramatic tech shifts in 2013, by the way. I hope I come to eat these words, but it seems like 2013 is the maturity of Android as a gaming platform with the release of Tegra 4, and Google's global conquest really comes to fruition as they take over the computing space with their mobile OS. Windows will flounder, qt5 will be awesome, I hope to see (maybe by my hand) KDE running on Wayland. I don't think we will get consumer grade robotics, 3d printing, or automated vehicles this year. We might see the hinting at something maybe coming in 2014, but this is a year of transition to the next thing. I hope I can get involved in whatever that is, not for profit, but for importance. I want to do big things. I live in fear of doing insignificant things in my time, and it is the biggest factor holding me back.