Monthly Review - December 2020

It’s the end of the year! I’ve had a wonderful time during my two weeks off, and I hope you did too! Here’s what my month looked like:

Track & Fitness

Two big accomplishments this month:

• I ran a Freelap-timed 6.73 in the 60m! This translates to a huge PR of 6.88 FAT. As long as I stay healthy and the track season actually happens, next year’s looking promising!

• I deadlifted my max (600lbs) from September for reps! (4x2 to be exact). I’ve lifted myself into a new problem: I’m out of weight and space to add it to my barbell, so I’ve been on Rogue’s waiting list for some thinner bumper plates.

Writing

• 2021 Predictions — “Excess deaths excluding coronavirus deaths exceed 1 million: 90%”
• Rising Early — “There’s no better way to start the day than warming up on the track as the sun rises.”
• Vitamin D and Heart Palpitations — “At just 25, I was legitimately worried about dying early.”
• Garmin Watch Faces: Custom Fonts — “Since FontBuilder doesn’t seem to be actively maintained, I forked FontBuilder with the following changes to add support for Garmin watches:”
• Technical Interviewer’s Checklist — “Remember what it’s like to be on the other side. Interviews are always stressful and scary: be empathetic and do whatever you can to reduce that stress!”
• Body Composition For Sprinters — “What’s the lowest body fat percentage I can sustain without risking injury or losing strength? How much should I focus on hypertrophy? What’s my ideal competition body weight? How should I manage body composition throughout my season?”

And, coming soon: my 2020 annual review and 2021 goals!

Projects

• I added a new layer of paint to my website for the new year. I hope you like it!
• I wrote some code to scrape Spotify’s API and fill a SQLite database. I’d like to analyze this dataset in the new year.
• Updated [roam/css] for new Roam updates.

Reading

• The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
• The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin P. Williams
• Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber

Links & Quotes

Track, Health, & Fitness

• Chronic Hamstring Problems in Sprinters: Management and Recovery
• To Drag the Toes (or Not) at the Start of a Sprint
• Benign PVCs: A Heart Rhythm Doctor’s Approach.
  • “PVCs might indicate training excess. I see this often in athletes. It might happen during a big training block or immediately afterwards”

Career & Self-improvement

• Interview advice that got me offers from Google, Microsoft, and Stripe
• 100 Tips for a Better Life - LessWrong
• Things You’re Allowed To Do
• Great Books

Other

• A $2.5 Trillion Question: What If Incomes Grew Like GDP Did? | RAND
• The Hacker Classics
• Systems Design Explains the World: Volume 1
  • “If you’re a startup and you think you have a truly disruptive innovation, then that’s great news for you. It’s a perfect answer to that awkward investor question, “What if [big company] decides to do this too?” because the honest truth is “their own politics will tear that initiative apart from the inside.”
• Why the US Dollar Could Outlast the American Empire
  • “Perhaps the best evidence that the euro is mostly a rebranded deutsche mark is that financial researchers writing about long-term currency behavior simply use the mark to extend their euro-related time series to before the euro’s launch in 1999.”
• Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail
  • “For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.”