This is the third in a series of monthly newsletters summarising updates to projects, blog posts and any tech news that has caught my interest. I have been away most of this month, so no new development but there are a couple of high-level articles I have managed to squeeze in.
Highlight
Learning a New Skill (Tree)
In a previous post Learning a new skill, I reflected on my learning process and concluded there are two important aspects - setting a concrete goal and making sure you stay motivated enough to achieve it. In order to satisfy both aspects, it helps to know the steps in order to achieve the goal. This will give you a good idea of the effort involved and to set expectations. Trying to distil acquiring a skill into a set of steps is not uncommon to those familiar with skill trees in games. In this post, I try to formalise the progression in snowboarding, visualising it as a skill tree.
Blog Posts
Learning a New Skill
I was recently asked, “How do you learn a new skill?”. It is not something I have really reflected on. Unfortunately, there is no “Ben’s ultimate step-by-step guide for learning a new skill” to draw from, but maybe there should be.
Other News
OpenAI Codex: Your Robot Assistant
An advancement of OpenIA’s GPT-3 model which can be used to write code from a natural language prompt. Not even programming profession is are safe from automation!
Your DNA is in a database
Privacy is a hot topic, but DNA takes it one step further because it isn’t just your information. Your DNA also contains information shared by current and future relatives.
Next Month
October I will be looking to get some more hands on experience with Docker, potentially setting up a swam on a set of Raspberry PIs. I am also learning the programming language GO, so I may have something to say on that!