Fearless Failings

Today I sat in a stadium amongst my fellow class of graduating engineers. We had speakers that spoke about fearless innovation and appreciation for those who helped us get to where we are today. Amongst ourselves, we shared where we would be moving on to, the places we would go to, and the institutions we would join.

Progress through failure was a theme that showed up throughout the day. We know that failure and loss is tied to the successes we hope to achieve. You have to be willing to give up what you have in order to get something better. You could fail and try one more time and have that one more try be the success you were looking for. Maybe you fail and never try again and never reach a goal that you set.

I used to get frustrated over what I wanted to do, but who could not in my current state? It was a reoccurring theme in my life. As a small example, I wanted to see the world like my peers when I was an adolescent. Go places with my family, and explore the world. At least get on a plane. And that happened, eventually, when I had the money and the opportunity, but I was 20 the first time I got on a plane. To this day, there are many more things I want to do but can not do at the moment. 

Regardless of your state in life: wishing, idle, satisfied. Remember 1. your goals, because they tell you who you are. 2. have the clarity to plan (to a degree) because then 3. you can make the most out of the opportunity when it shows itself, and 4. you will make progress this way and you will be more prepared than the last time you wished or tried, or failed. 

. . .

Today I graduated. Tomorrow I'll strive for more.

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Motivation for Scientists

This week I want to write some content for those pursuing or planning to pursue a scientific field. Understanding the purpose of science may serve as some motivation to get over initial hurdles that are often found in STEM-related fields.

There exists quite a debate on the discovery of science. Some people argue that science started during the Renaissance when the scientific method was developed. The scientific method gave became the baseline of building findings within the field since it provided a way of verifying findings. The consensus seems to be that science came from the ancient Greeks, great thinkers of the time: Hippocrates and Aristotle, about 460 - 322 BC. Greek philosophers asked essential questions related to how things worked, questions of how we came to be, or how the land could float on water. These thinkers sought non-supernatural explanations for natural phenomena.

Medicine became a field that was studied by Hippocrates and his followers, who were set on describing the human body,  diseases, and medical conditions. In Egypt, Euclid laid foundations in mathematical foundations, introducing the concept of definitions, axioms, theorems, and proofs. Linguistics gave way to generative grammar. Astronomy let us understand the world around us. Science all around the globe became anything from a religion to a way of thinking to an everyday tool to be used by people. It may also be how to earn a living. I think no matter what we do or how we think of science, it does not change its goal of understanding the natural world around us. 

Scientists seek information to expand our knowledge and help us live better lives. I think that is a great thing to be able to contribute to the understanding of the world (it can be through products, papers, research, etc.), and although it may be difficult or tiring: knowledge sought is knowledge gained.

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Driving at your own pace

Can you remember a time you felt pressured to do something... to make a choice, a comment, or an action? I like comparing it to the feeling of driving. When times are hard, and we try to step back, it can feel difficult, like driving downhill with your foot off the breaks.

Other times we drive on, seeing new sights, traveling farther away from places we were, becoming more. We quickly forget we drove through wonderful times or even difficult times. In many ways, still, we keep driving along. 

Never Forgetting

In many ways, I believe anyone has a memory, a place, a skill, a trait, an item, or a person that they would never abandon. It becomes the grooves on the steering wheel or the shape of the air conditioning vents or how we display time on the dash. Whatever we hold valuable is what drives us through easy or hard times. 

Choice is Freedom

Ever heard of the paradox of choice? " The  more options we're given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose because we're aware of all the other options we're potentially forfeiting." Like forks in the road, we must live with the choices we make and the burden of the freedom to make choices. Holding onto what we should never forget grounds us in these choices and makes us more confident in how we make our choices. 

Learning Still

While we drive towards our goals by choice or by the world, we learn much about what we genuinely care for. Maybe it was a pit stop that we took with someone, a promise that was made. Or perhaps it was the solo trip that we took one day just to find ourselves in a new place. 

In many ways, still, we keep driving along. 

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Package Managers, Compilers, And More?

Ever had an inkling to try something new? I think many people have wished they were a bit more tech-savvy. Especially when technical jargon gets thrown across think tank spaces, industry, and even the news now.

No matter your tech-inspired goals, I think a good start to navigating and understanding how to develop software can from understanding the frameworks and utilities available out there. So today I'll be talking about package managers and host of other topics to get a little more in tune to the tech space. 

Credits to the host site: http://netrunner-mag.com/2014/03/28/manage-my-package/

You may be wondering what package managers are and how they apply to get more stuff done and developing. If you are ready for a small aside, please humor me through this. 

Imagine that you are writing code for an airplane or a mobile phone. You are not going to code all of this from scratch. The nice thing about coding is that language has its standard libraries for reading into data, opening files, etc. These libraries consist of methods or functions that, given a little bit of information, can carry out a process. Imagine having to write the same code over and over again. It'd be hard to read. That's we like to organize our code and modularize it into methods.

Furthermore, it would be challenging to create products if you had to learn programming without the use of any standard library methods. It'd require understanding much computer architecture before even getting to see anything similar to an airplane or mobile app software. And imagine mapping bits and bytes to actual processes on the hardware... ick. No, often, we code software that takes our syntax or coding language and turns it into ones and zeros for our hardware to execute. Note that anytime one language gets translated into another, it's called compiling. Compilers do the work of compiling, and often they are savvy enough to provide additional optimizations and features to our code.

Package managers allow you to download libraries and utilities onto your computer without having to go onto the host site to download a zip file, unpack it on your computer, install in the right place, make sure your computer knows where it is... and then repeat this process every time there's an update to that utility!! If you noticed the meme above, you only have to download and install the package manager for your computer's operating system once, and then you can use that package manager to install any other utility you need. If you are in the tech space you'll often hear things like apt-get install .... or yum install ...

These are the commands you would type into your terminal or computer to execute the package manager and to tell it you want to install a particular library or utility. You can check out a list of package managers here. You'll notice they're operating system dependent.

Last week I saved a ton of time when I installed a cross-compiler to take my C code and compile it into an executable binary code file that my raspberry pi could run. It's called a cross-compiler because it makes the code I developed on my machine (which has an Intel CPU) and compiles it into code an ARM CPU (processor) can read and run. CPUs or central processing units are the brains of a computer. Different CPUs from different companies often don't play very friendly together since the hardware is created differently, so a command of ones and zeros can mean something completely different or gibberish on one machine and be everything nice and understanding to another. 

I think that often there will be this talk up for how difficult getting started is because you need a virtual machine (VM) or a certain operating system (OS). A lot of times we can get around this by simply installing some software utility that we can run from our current system.

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Comment below what you would like to read about next! And let me know, what you think? Was this helpful?

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A Personal Journey of Strengths

Last week I turned 22. I felt anticipation leading up to that day. A strong pull for the days leading up to my birthday to be over already. Then I could get over being a year older. Not sure why, but it was difficult to reflect on what I wanted to change about myself. 

Sure I could ask for more capacity, like for the energy or the tolerance to endure difficult situations or the room in my heart to grow for people in my life. The thing is, I've always asked for these things: for more patience, more strength, more wisdom. I want to share, that these things often also come from honing who we naturally are; the strengths that make up who we are. This year I plan to rely on my natural strengths instead, in order to guide my goals and expectations for myself.

The Clifton Strengths Finder

https://www.gallupstrengthscenter.com/Home/en-US/CliftonStrengths-Books

“There is no more effective way to empower people than to see each person in terms of his or her strengths.”

— Don Clifton

I read the strengths finder 2.0 book almost a year ago, the book described the idea of unique strengths and the fact that everyone is born with natural strengths and abilities that prevail throughout a person's life. These skills are natural to us and it can benefit us to understand them and build them up in order to apply them in our interests. Based on research it was found that we have 5 top themes or strengths in our lives, (it is possible to have many of the unique strengths-- the book describes over 30 something). We can benefit from understanding these strengths in order to guide our careers, relationships, and life paths. 

Coincidentally for class, this month, I took the Clifton strengths finder assessment to determine my top 5 strengths.

They are:

1. Activator, 2. Significance, 3. Achiever, 4. Competition, 5. Adaptability.

It was neat to see how these strengths could come together to form a personality, at least for myself. As my professor mentioned in class, "The best way to work well in a team, is to be a better team member," this can't happen without understanding ourselves and how we might interact with others.

Here are some snippets of my final reports from the assessment, you can expect to have unique paragraphs/descriptions with the themes : 

This is quite an open-ended post for now as I progress on some methods and applications of my strengths throughout some time.

But leave me a comment below, what are your strengths? How do you plan to use them this year? Have you taken the Gallup Strengths Finder test; what do you think of it?

I am personally interested to see how my strengths can mesh with the strengths of others in a team setting throughout this engineering capstone course. 

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Understanding Bits and Bytes

One of the first concepts covered in computer science class is the bit. We've come to know that it represents either a one or a zero, but what does this really mean? How do our computers process these ones and zeros to give us the functionalities we have today? 

No worries, that's what part 1 of this post will help with!

Alright-- So we know that bits work like switches: on or off. The on state is represented by a one, in real life, this corresponds to the presence of some voltage beyond a certain threshold.  The off is, similarly, represented by a zero. 

Ok great this means we can represent two states with one bit. That's great if we spoke in binary or only used two letters to communicate with one another.

What if we add more bits together? Well, now we have quite a few combinations of ones and zeros. If you start to draw out the possible combinations you'll notice that we can have many states: 2^(number of bits) to be exact. 

Source: http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/Topics/19.htm

A byte is a group of bits. Of course, you can also say you have a 4-bit number or an 8-bit number and so on. (For terminologies sake, in case you were curious).

Anyway, with so many bits, we can represent the alphabet and make sentences or strings as its commonly called in the field. The goes the other way as well: imagine writing some code or a program, our text gets manipulated and processed into groups of bits for parts of the CPU (the brain of the computer) to execute the various logic commands.

That's the basics of bits and bytes for now. Leave me a comment, was this helpful? What would you like to learn about next?

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