2018 Reflection

What went well?

More responsibility at work

Getting more responsibility is stressful and fun at the same time, luckily my team leads and project manager are good at helping me.

One of the main changes when leading is that my decision starts to impact a larger part of the project, for better or worse. This means that I need to be more cautious when making decision, and strike a better balance between ensuring safety and making progress.

I learned a lot more about functional programming

I am thankful to be in the same team with Olivier, which he taught us a lot about functional programming. In addition, our team leads have been open with advanced technique which allow us to learn things on our job.

Recursion Schemes

I’ve learn some basic of recursion schemes, and manage to apply it in an open source project basil

Tagless Final

I am starting to appreciate interpreter pattern more. By separating definition and execution, one can gain a lot of power without paying huge refactoring cost.

Example: Execute a program with debounce Effect to prevent rate limit exception from a remote API

Wrote an interesting library: basil

I wrote this library out of curiosity, and learn a lot in the process, I’ve learn about higher kinded fix, FreeApplicative and a lot more.

It’s cool to (re)discover that I am most motivated when exploring new stuff, even if it’s not useful.

Reboot my own blog: https://qingwei91.github.io

While my company blog undergone some changes which makes it harder to submit a blogpost, I decided to start my own blog again.

I didn’t write as many blog as I wanted, let’s hope I will do it more in the coming year.

Formed a habit to gym

I am very happy that I am going to gym more often, it’s started to form a habit. This youtube channel is one of my favorite channel about working out, thanks Jeff !

Enhanced my culinary skills

I enjoy cooking and have been trying out different recipes, hurray !

What went wrong?

Investment went deep down, I mean deep down

I made a couple of big mistakes:

a) Invest (speculate ?) without knowing how to make valuation b) Not knowing to cut-loss and take profit c) Putting all pressure on my wife which is an amateur

these combined with uncertainty brought by trade war, and slow down of global economy means a bad year for our investment

Mistakes in work due to carelessness

I realized I get carried away rather easily, there’s a part of me that behaves like an enthusiastic dog that is eager to do whatever I am tasked to do :D

While being enthusiastic is not a bad thing, it certainly isn’t an excuse for recklessness, I need to be more mindful when making decision or taking actions.

Fail to develop an arbitrage software I planned earlier of the year

I wanted to build an arbitrage engine but didn’t finish it, couple of reasons:

• the project turns out to be quite difficult and messy due to external api changes
• I didn’t have a clear plan when developing
• It’s not as fun as I originally envision

I need to work on my energy management and be more focus on my goal, it’s ok to give up but there has to be a good reason

Action Points

Improve my investment skills

• Develop a methodology to evaluate a stock
• Develop a strategy to take profit and cut loss
• Iterate the strategy by learning from historical actions

Be more careful and cautious

I think it’s hard to suddenly become a careful person, I can however starts with some actionable things:

• Double check a decision with experts
• Think thrice when pulling a dependency, a dependency is a backdoor waiting to happen
• Act slower when you’re dealing with something new that you aren’t familiar