A Digital Garden - frequent growth but a bit weedy in the back corner
Created 20260615
Confession time.
I worry about my projects. Not in any ridiculous way. I don’t think… But there are a few things that have occurred to me lately so I figured I’d write them down.
Any of this resonate?
How should we deal with these concerns?
Notice how I dumped my guilt onto y’all there by a clever bit of association? Bad puppy!
This one is actually quite easy for me in many ways. I’ve just come to accept the fact that some projects really are big. Nothing to be done about that. The universe is the way it is. You just have to take a stoic approach and accept that as hard landscape.
The only thing you have control over is how you deal with the large project. And again, for me, I’ve found I’m quite good at decomposing big projects into lots of small projects and putting them into a tree structure. That way I can
Is the concept of the whole tree somewhat intimidating? Sure. But you get to the top of the mountain by taking one step at a time till there’s no more ‘up’. Simple.
What’s a zombie project? It’s one of those projects you started with good intentions but for whatever reason, valid or invalid, you gave up on. Maybe something more urgent came along. Maybe you found it was harder than you thought. Maybe it was more effort than you could justify.
I suspect everybody has these. With the possible exception of really boring people. I’ve got loads. Some of them are public. Most of them not.
I’m coming around to the idea that making them public has merit. For a couple of reasons. Firstly, it exposes the project to the light. If it’s public you’re more likely to think about it and you’re more likely to work on it. Secondly, if nobody knows about them, nobody is going to ask you about them. And if nobody asks about them you’ll think nobody’s interested in them. Even if they are.
Here’s one I’ve not touched for ages: Notes on Knuth’s The Art Of Computer Programming. I didn’t get very far on that before I realised I needed to read more books in order to be able to understand it. Given its reputation that wasn’t exactly a huge surprise though.
So I started reading Epp and Rosen. I made it quite a long way through Epp and I’ve got a boat load of notes on that which I really would like to convert to LaTeX and publish but other things got bumped up the todo list so it’s stalled for now. Such is life. Is that a little bit embarrassing? Not finishing it? Sure. But in reality the other things ended up being more important so it was the right call. Maybe I’ll get back to it again soon. It was fun.
Anyway, in the spirit of publishing this stuff, I did convert my AOCP notes to LaTeX and I did publish the to GitHub. Baby steps…
So I’m going to try harder to make more of my zombies public. After I’ve popped down The Winchester for a nice cold pint.
The other issue I seem to have is just this insatiable interest in far too many things. It’s a super power but it’s also Kryptonite.
It’s a super power in the sense that I have this very useful and broad framework drawn from a metric shit tonne of different stuff that I can hang new stuff on. Having a discussion about left vs right in politics? Well, a quick internal Google brings up bang-bang control theory and I can instantly relate that to voting in a party from the left until things get a bit too touchy feely and as a result voting in a party from the right until things get a bit too corporate overlordy. S’great.
The downside is that I spend a lot of time working on stuff I shouldn’t really be working on. Or shoooouuuuld I?……. It does irritate me a bit that I’m lightly skilled in a remarkable range of things but that I struggle to focus on becoming an expert in one. Not necessarily a bad thing but it is something I want to work on.
How to fix that? I want to do both. So I’m gonna do both. There’s 24 hours in the day. Every day for everybody. And I’m no different. It’s really just about allocation.
So the plan is to allocate a decent chunk of that 24 hours to doing a deep dive on a specific subject. Whilst at the same time allowing myself the freedom to spend at least some of the 24 doing shit like writing this blog post.
I’m going to pick one tiny niche thing and become the world’s expert on it. That’s not arrogant by the way. I’m just gonna pick something so niche and so tiny that I’m going to be pretty much the only person involved with it.
No spoilers but it’s gonna be something like “The history of Albanian rivets from May 1974 to July 1974”. See? World expert in less than ten minutes.
Then I’ll expand out until I’m the world expert on rivets from the whole of the Balkans for the entire year of 1974. And people will be beating a path to my door.