My Learning Log

Category: Uncategorized

  • little adjustments

    Adjustments, adjustments. It seems like that happens a lot with me. For a good reason. I am always on a lookout for better practices, better techniques. I am looking to find ways to work better, accomplish more.

    Nothing comes for free.

    No doubt about that. 

    One of the things I adjusted last was to minimize the time wasted when I wake up in the morning. So rather than trying to wake up upstairs by sitting down, reading news, etc., I just head down straight. Time saved, 10 to 15 minutes, or more.

    Things like that. And just by mistake, I discovered something else. I will be splitting allowance for my wife every 2 days, so rather than giving her $220 every Friday, I will be giving her $80 on M, W, and F. I think that should work better. And hopefully that will allow her to control it as well.

    Little things.

    But it’s the little things that matter.

    It’s the little things that make a difference!

  • working differently

    Having goals is a great thing. It forces focus. It makes sure that I do things efficiently.

    It makes the time more valuable.

    Being too focused can also have negative effects. One of which is a narrow point of view of life.

    After vacation, things changed. I am reevaluating how I do things. It really helps to step out and get a different focus.

    One of the changes that I did was to get rid of wasting time in the morning before taking a shower. It used to take me 15-20 minutes of reading time. Second thing I’m doing is reading less Polish news. I already read too much. It makes me too focused on reading the latest. For what? I need to tune out a bit. Step outside. I will learn what’s important from twitter.

    I want to get back to reading poetry, fiction, non-technical material. Not only self-help, but other works as well. I do have some time on a weekend. I should utilize it effectively. Working differently.

  • playing and helping

    I am playing checkers with my son. It’s fun. He like it. I like it as well. 

    Things that don’t kill me make me stronger. I got hurt by wm, but that’s not going to stop me helping him. I still will. But I will remember that. And the relationship will suffer for a bit. No feelings hurt. But I’m going to leave him alone more now, as he wishes. Since he said that he does not want a teacher, then let him be on his own. I want to help those that want help. It’s optional. 

  • time in the am

    I am setting new goals for myself. I waste a lot of time in the morning reading news. I don’t want to do that anymore. From now on, I am going to change those habits. After I wake up in the morning, I will head straight down. That should give me 15 or 20 more minutes in the morning.  And if I am not able to do that consistently, then why wake up at 5:15? Perhaps I should adjust it to 5:30?

    This week and next I will try to change and utilize the time towards good use, learning time that is.

  • some friction

    It’s been a dissapointing day for me today. On a personal level. I got injuried by my newest acquisition. And it’s nothing really unexpected, but it hurts. In either case, I will use it as a building block, as a well to build some insulation between me and him.

    But I will not give in.

    This is my team and him probably not getting my message well doesn’t mean that I will stop doing it. I’m trying to help. 

    I do understand that there are risks with people with experience. I knew that. I expected that. I have to learn to deal with that.

    In a way, he has a right to act that way. As long as it does not distract.

    It’d be interesting how it plays out down the road.

  • visit to PL

    We visited Poland over the Christmas vacation. Almost 3 weeks we spent there. My wife is in love. I am not. Not to say that one day we’re not going to move there. Perhaps we will. But some things will not change in Poland. Some things are just going to take a few generations to change. Like attitude towards Church. Especially in Borowa. Well, everywhere. 

    It’s going to take some time till people earn better wages. There’s a disparity. People don’t make enough, but everything is expensive. With time, that should change. Perhaps when that happens, that’s going to be a sign for me. Or work. Unemployment is really high. It has to around 7 or 8% for it to be considered full employment. Right now there are a lot of people without jobs. That’s not a good situation.

    And then there’s Kacwin. It’s nice, but there is also something about it that I don’t like. It’s really smoggy in winter time. Lots of people burn coal. And the air quality is really bad because of that. Roads are also not very nice. 

    Poland might be nice, someday. We might move there, someday. Just not now.

  • first week in Poland

    Tomorrow will be a week in Poland. What have I observed? What have I learned?

    One thing is for sure: I’m drinking a lot! Probably too much. I have to slow down. Other than that, I have not seen much. It’s mostly been visiting family here in Borowa. Soon we will visit Kacwin. I hope to visit a few more places, see other people. 

    I would like to start writing this journal every time I wake up. But a lot of times I’m either tired or I forget. I shouldn’t do that.

    I don’t think Poland is for me. Not now. Not yet. Things are changing, I can see people getting richer. That’s a good sign. Very good sign. As a result, I see people buying more. I see cities and villages getting richer, cleaner. Things are improving in Poland.

    I am curious to see how things look in Kacwin. Kacwin is a little richer. That whole area is a little richer, more beatiful. Things are different.

    But is it changing? From what I know, Kacwin is. It did change a lot in the past year. I want to see it firsthand.

  • asking for results

    I can’t please everybody all the time. Or I should say, if I try to please everybody, I will please nobody.

    As a manager, sometimes I need to be tough. Getting things done sometimes requires asking for that extra push. It sometimes requires not to be nice. I don’t like not being nice, but have no choice.

    It’s cool to work on things that are nice to have. But at the end of the day, we need to be working on the tasks that we have on our plate. I asked W about an item that he should have completed. Then I asked him to get it done.

    Nothing too mean. Just being direct and asking for results. Will it yield results? We’ll see.

  • learning

    It’s good to have focus. When I get out of focus, peformance suffers.

    Couple things here.

    Knowing what to learn. I am putting extra 2 pomos every day. To what? What am I learning. That’s the point, I need to know what I’m learning ahead of time.

    So what I am learning? In the AM, I am focusing mainly on refactoring. I am focusing on learning how to improve the inner workings of existing legacy code that we have.

    That’s good.

    But what am I learning after that. I have opportunities during the day, then again before I go to sleep.

    I need to learn about the technologies that we use at work. Cassandra. I need to spend even more time doing that. Map reduce. Hive. Then we have other projects, like scorer and the cfp pipeline. I am slowly starting to put the pieces together. But I need to review, redraw.

    There’s also Java. I do need to learn bits and pieces from it. 

    And then there is craftsmanship, design patterns. Those are all that I am learning and deepening my knowledge about. All good topics, wouldn’t you say?

  • actions, leadback and transport pixels

    I am learning something new everyday. But I’m trying to learn to remember. So I will be reflecting on the things I learned, first, here in the learning log, and then in my paper notebook. I will try to redraw everythng that I learned.

    I’m not used to this type of learning. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why I have not learned all the systems very well. Perhaps.

    Action Pixels

    Our actions used to be setup with offer_level. So before we could get setup with a marketer, we had to create all the offer levels and ask the marketer to plug them in. That was a very involved process. And the bulk of the work was on the marketer. Not only that, it was error prone.

    So we switched.

    We switched to a single pixel per marketer. We’re giving them a single pixel and they have the freedom to provide us categories. I believe network id is hard coded? In any case, once we receive the request, the pixel is treated as a transport pixel. We lookup PIXEL_MAP table for the right offer level and to see if there are any. If so, we also lookup NAMESPACE_MAP for the pixel_id, ns_code, and network id.

    We also add an entry to LeadbackHistory for the transport pixel. Then, for every offer level associated with that pixel, we also add an entry.