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@aldrocha - 2024 Resolutions

Getting back into good habits, and entering the world of AI.

Is great to be back! It feels like ages since I last wrote here. These past few years have been full of intense work, stressing deadlines, and a clear neglect for this newsletter. However, that doesn’t mean that I’ve completely stopped writing. Actually, last year has been the year that I’ve written the most in my life.

Let me explain you why…

My personal Journal

It was the 28th of December of 2022. Every year on the same day, I sit down at home, I put on good music, and I spend an hour or two reflecting on the past year. I’ve been doing this since my last year of college, and so far it has worked like a charm for me. I use this time to think about all my achievements and failures of the year both, personally and professionally. In the process, I think of ways to make my next year even better. I design my goals and habits, and I try to my system.

That day on 2022 one of the things I realized is that I was having a really hard time remembering all the things that have happened the past year. I felt like I had been on autopilot all year, and I wasn’t spending as much time thinking about random stuff as in previous years. My solution to this? Starting a personal journal. This was one of my main 2023 resolutions.

Since then, every night from the 1st of January of 2023 I’ve written (actually, handwritten) several hundred words a day with ideas, the highlights of my day, or whatever I was in the mood of writing that day. This exercise was great to let my mind wander for a bit every day fostering my creativity, and incidentally taking better track of all of the highlights of the year.

So now you know why I say that 2023 has been the year that I’ve written the most ever.

My website

On this year’s (2023 edition) reflection exercise, I saw that there was a recurring theme I kept writing about on my diary: I missed sharing my writings and all of my learning with a broader audience than myself.

To kill the itch, I repurposed my personal website and started using it as my technical journal. I created a “TIL” (Today I Learned) section to write down interesting things that I may have come across in my daily work, and a standard “All posts” section with more long-formed and worked writings.`

I ended up writing less than I would’ve hoped for due to a lack of time. Moreover, no one was aware of its existence because I wasn’t widely advertising it, so no one was reading it. But at least now I had a public space where I could start quickly writing ideas in case I wanted to share them in the future.

This newsletter…

Another recurring topic that kept appearing on my journal in 2023 was how I missed coming up with lots of ideas, and learning something new every week. Funnily, the sole responsible for that habit was this newsletter. The moment I stopped writing here I lost that habit. The fact that I had to write a new publication every week meant that I had to either come up with ideas, or read about some topic and understand it deeply enough to be able to write about it. It was clear to me that I had to write in this newsletter again whatever it took.

So here I am again. This year I want to prioritize my learning around the field of AI. I feel that a lot has happened in the past year, and I have just been following it from the side. The newsletter can be a good excuse to start get up to speed with the new developments in the field.

… and a new format.

The only thing that will change from the previous version of the newsletter is that instead of writing a new publication weekly, I will do it bi-weekly (to give myself some space to think and research new topics).

The other thing that will change is that instead of writing long-form publications directly in Substack, I will collect of all my writings (and interesting references) of the the two weeks window between posts and directly share them here. This will make the emails that you receive smaller and (hopefully) easier to consume. In any case, I am open to feedback and I am planning to iterate as I ramp up.

🎁

And if you’ve manage to get this far, I wanted to leave you with a treat. My first publication of 2024 🚀

Any comments, contributions, or feedback? Ping me!

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