Make a miniature model first

I've been taught this time and time again, I've seen Cormac do it repeatedly in the ECMAScript design process, I've been told by Mitch repeatedly to do it, but it still hasn't become instinct for me: when you're facing a dauntingly large system, it's incredibly helpful to start by extracting coherent but manageably small subsets of the design and model them first. It's amazing how well that works to make a system less terrifying to work with.

A page of the dissertation

Ron Garcia suggested that I should get in the practice of writing a little bit for my dissertation each day, so that when crunch time comes, I'll already have a lot of material to work with. This being New Year's, I should also go to the gym, eat healthier, clean my home and my office, make a budget, fix more bugs, and organize my time.

But I just wrote my first page of content for the dissertation, and that feels pretty good. There's even a lemma!

Solving the wrong problem

I've been having a depressing couple of weeks trying to solve a really hard problem in my research. Occasionally I thought I had some promising leads, but usually they just led to more despair.

Then I discovered today that I've been tackling the entirely wrong problem all along.

I never knew feeling so stupid could feel so good.