The first step in getting to do valuable work is to find the right problem statement. And the most important fundamentals for any worthwhile PS come from figuring out the existing work that has been done, and finding a gap in it. Ideally, this should take up 80% of the effort being put into solving anything. The other 20% is to figure out the right experiments to back up any proposed findings. To reiterate, it is easy to find solutions for tough problems, once we know the problem and the existing effort put into it. But, why bother with all this?

If no one bothered, then we probably wouldn’t have put a man on moon. Someone in some grumpy-ass lab did all the grunt work to set the stage for everything else that was built on top of it. This is a thankless job, but that is just work like any other field. I do not mean to comment on the moral implications of it, although it might sound like it. Research is a noble pursuit. I have heard that enough times, but no one bothers to think of all the failure and hitting brick walls that accompanies it.

I started writing this just to re-emphasise to myself the importance of finding the right related work and experimental setup before trying to come up with a solution for anything. As one of my great friends put it (for some completely unrelated thing), you must be clear on what you want first, before you can go and get it. In another direction, that also helps with narrowing down the landscape to see that we are not trying to solve everything at once, but instead that we are looking for something specific.

A.

These are the kind of musings which motivate me to get to work instead of trying to predict future outcomes all the time. So, in the spirit of doing things more systematically, I will write about things from time to time. This serves two purposes:

1. I gain a clear understanding of my work, which can also be explained to others.

2. I can organize and keep track of my work.

I am Abinash, and I recently left my engineering role at an amazing tech company. I love to work, almost to the point of being a workaholic. That was sort of a major reason why I quit. For one it was not aligned with where I wanted to be, and also most of my friends have moved to a different city. Thus, I figured might as well take a break. I’ll spend some more time on what I love, which is research. I am going through a slightly more applied path this time, instead of diving into pure math work. The current project will involve using Apache Datafusion, which is like LLVM but for database systems, along with something exciting related to LLM inference. But more on that later.

Outside of work I like to travel and hang out with my friends. And watching TV. I watch a lot of TV when at home. In the past I used to have difficulty separating fiction from reality, but now I am getting the hang of it. Getting to know nuances and depth in people, especially people outside of tech, has been very educating. I wish I had done this sooner, but oh well. I am off to breakfast. So that’s it for today.

A.

Jungle -- Tash Sultana (2017)