An update on my life so far

Thu May 26 2016

These past two weeks have been uppy and downy. I had one week of zero motivation (week 20) but after that I managed to get out of my funk.

I have been neglecting my accounting textbook but I realise belatedly that I don't really have an interest in it.

I didn't manage to read any books in Week 20 but I did manage to finish Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Extremely readable, extremely fun (although rather dated--at the time of print, the Higgs boson had yet to be discovered.)

The Saturday of Week 20 I managed to get two tutors after being rejected by Marc on Friday. I met up with nauxiy and Ariel and I managed to teach them the whole syllabus in a couple of hours each. That's very encouraging because it tells me that my students should have no problems handling the material. My experience with teaching them helped me to identify several pain points and I revamped my slides to better address these pain points.

Jia Run came on the Friday of Week 20 and her arrival got me out of my funk. We ate good food and went to a couple of places although on Week 21 Monday she asked me to go home because she wanted to shop alone :(

I've been writing quite a lot of Python code. I'm trying to push the limits of what Python Turtle can do and generate the most impressive programs that will really knock the socks off of people. My hope is that one of my tutees in the pilot class will want to build something super cool and super ambitious and it will be good to showcase.

Speaking of pilot class--I shot a message to Oscar and he told me that the training is likely to be in end June. So I have about a month's time to get everything in order. I recently revamped my syllabus and proposal, and I think I'll have to build a Python Titans website. (But still no idea what to put in it)

I've been reading a lot of Peter Guo's stuff (pgbovine.net). He's an excellent writer and he writes about things that interest me greatly (such as how to stay singularly focused, how to get things done, computer programming and so on). I'll be using his tools Codeopticon and Python Tutor in my course. Codeopticon is not yet available--I found it in his research paper--I emailed him the day before to ask him when Codeopticon would be avaiable. He says my email "encouraged him to prioritise it".

Short-term goals:

1. Build Python Titans website
2. Continue refining proposal and syllabus
3. Recruit another tutor