Doh. This always happens. I start training hard and forget to stop training hard. Then my body reminds me in increasingly unsubtle ways.
Periodization is hard because it means slowing down/doing less. For a chunk of time. The chunk of time that seems to work right now is 2 weeks on, 1 week off. By off I don't mean 'on the couch', I just mean that the runs stay easy and unstructured, and the mileage drops.
Coming back from my last off week has been hard. It coincided with a real motherf*cker of a week at work. Where I was going till 11pm, and not doing the fun stuff -- it was 11PM emails. I've got to change that. I've got fun stuff to do, but at 11PM I'm too fried to do it. Need to shift my schedule around so that my brain is good on the fun stuff.
What is the fun stuff these days? It's statistics, machine learning, making sure I touch Python enough to not need to google every other syntactical wrinkle. I swore (lividly) that I would never become a manager again. That oath has been dropped -- the opportunity to scale an effort and succeed at that bigger scale was more tempting than the opportunity to go deep. But I've got to keep the things that got me to this point -- the love of making things -- around, otherwise I lose my way.
This is hard, with the amount of coordination this new group requires. But one key thing I've realized is that the work is never done. So chiseling out 'me time' to hack out ugly naive bayes algorithms in python with canned datasets beats the hell out of watching TV.
What's fun about management? Well, a lot of things, this time. I'm not a line manager anymore, I'm managing a very senior team of managers who get along and want to get things done. I get to set strategy and higher level tactics, and as a team we work out the concrete implementations. I get to do things in a way I would have wanted them done when I was an individual contributor working around severely flawed processes.
That stuff is all good, but without scratching the itch to make something, I will become a mid-level manager and stop there.
I had taken about 2 months away from coding at all, and decided to try an interview question one of our top guys used on a recent interview candidate. It's a simple question: given an integer, translate the integer to it's word representation. btw, simple != hard :) There are some interesting edge cases (the teens) and some harder variations (where do you put the word 'and'?), and an elegant solution is hard to come by. But I did (finally) grind out a nice way to do this using the mod and div operators.
The sad part is it took me a while. The good part is that I eventually cleared away the mental cobwebs. Hopefully I can keep them cleared out even as management duties accelerate.
Periodization is hard because it means slowing down/doing less. For a chunk of time. The chunk of time that seems to work right now is 2 weeks on, 1 week off. By off I don't mean 'on the couch', I just mean that the runs stay easy and unstructured, and the mileage drops.
Coming back from my last off week has been hard. It coincided with a real motherf*cker of a week at work. Where I was going till 11pm, and not doing the fun stuff -- it was 11PM emails. I've got to change that. I've got fun stuff to do, but at 11PM I'm too fried to do it. Need to shift my schedule around so that my brain is good on the fun stuff.
What is the fun stuff these days? It's statistics, machine learning, making sure I touch Python enough to not need to google every other syntactical wrinkle. I swore (lividly) that I would never become a manager again. That oath has been dropped -- the opportunity to scale an effort and succeed at that bigger scale was more tempting than the opportunity to go deep. But I've got to keep the things that got me to this point -- the love of making things -- around, otherwise I lose my way.
This is hard, with the amount of coordination this new group requires. But one key thing I've realized is that the work is never done. So chiseling out 'me time' to hack out ugly naive bayes algorithms in python with canned datasets beats the hell out of watching TV.
What's fun about management? Well, a lot of things, this time. I'm not a line manager anymore, I'm managing a very senior team of managers who get along and want to get things done. I get to set strategy and higher level tactics, and as a team we work out the concrete implementations. I get to do things in a way I would have wanted them done when I was an individual contributor working around severely flawed processes.
That stuff is all good, but without scratching the itch to make something, I will become a mid-level manager and stop there.
I had taken about 2 months away from coding at all, and decided to try an interview question one of our top guys used on a recent interview candidate. It's a simple question: given an integer, translate the integer to it's word representation. btw, simple != hard :) There are some interesting edge cases (the teens) and some harder variations (where do you put the word 'and'?), and an elegant solution is hard to come by. But I did (finally) grind out a nice way to do this using the mod and div operators.
The sad part is it took me a while. The good part is that I eventually cleared away the mental cobwebs. Hopefully I can keep them cleared out even as management duties accelerate.
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