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| "There are years that ask questions, and years that answer." Zora Neale Hurston |
2014 mark a failure on my part on few areas. First and foremost I failed in finalizing the Msc I started in 2013, only managing to scrape a Higher Diploma in the process.
I somehow neglected my friendships and myself.
I did not go scuba diving as much as I had initially envisaged, stop going to Aikido, my lack of exercising. All this also resulted in some extra gain weight, basically regaining all I had lost in the past two years.
But at the same time, I had a couple of interesting opportunities and encounters.
I went for the first time to Body & Soul, and it was a refreshing experience.
I started to go to meetups, mainly related to R, Data Analytics, hackers and Python related subjects, and discovered a vibrant community.
As a result of one of this encounter, I was part of a team who entered the Kaggle Epilepsy challenge ; we ended up in the first tier, not that bad for a first participation.
I engage myself in more projects, and used online resources (Coursera, Checkio ) to practice and learn more about python, programming and data analysis.
So what did I learn from all that...
- Always ask questions, question everything. Ask for help and advice to mentor and veterans. This is something I was doing all the time when I started my engineering career, but somehow during my thesis, I forgot about it.
- Be relentless, and focus. Only chase one rabbit at a time. Focus on the task at hand, then move on.
- I need my own alone time, to reflect on my own project. Somehow I forgot that about myself.
- Exercise, make it a habit. Either be going dancing (salsa/swing) every week, snorkelling, hiking or diving.
- Have project and objectives, those might change depending on opportunities arising.
- Not only seize opportunities, but also thrive to create them.
- Embrace friendship and be present when needed.
I intend for 2015, to learn from those errors and not reproduce the same mistakes again.
