New Year
I am here to express my desire to grow this next year to the universe. Any action I can take is a sign that the universe has listened back.
My main goal for 2026 is simple: become a fantastic MLSys engineer.
I want to be able to read and write code at an exceptionally high level to make AI fast and efficient.
I will do this by reading and completing all exercises for PMPP, and reading Fluent Python to improve overall programming skills, and hopefully by the end of January have at least ONE working implementation of Flash Attention. For now, this is enough.
More abstractly, something I need to focus on this upcoming year is agency. To me, this is how this will work:
Giving myself the most meaningful work possible, not giving myself work that doesn’t really matter right now, and then actually getting the stuff that does matter done.
It is dead simple, just a greedy algorithm optimizing to setup a good foundation that I can use to find more awesome stuff.
In the past I have struggled with this a lot, just having way too many things going on at once, and I know again this will be challenging because of school. But with what limited free time and mental bandwidth I have, I want to become someone extremely capable at MLSys.
I want to become obsessed with this.
The analogy that I came up with is that I have been a frog trapped in a well up until now.
All strategies have been like rainstorms - they fill the well up a bit, and things are looking better, but then the momentum fades and the water dries up, and the frog stays in the well.
With a level of obsession, we no longer have a rain cloud - we have a stream, a constant source of water that is filling the well and not stopping.
There is no time for the water to dry up because there is no breaks like there was before.
And so, too, with passion I will be filled with direction towards my goals. It is something that I could not stop even if I wanted to.
An inevitable truth.
The only concern is that the frog must not drown.
But I trust my frog, alongside his little froggy support system :)
And the other concern is wherefore does this water flow? What is the reason for the obsession to even exist?
This answer is far simpler than I could have ever imagined. We will all die.
It might not be tomorrow, but it will happen.
I will not go down like a little baby bitch.