My Pocket Reading for 2014

The year is nearly over, and I just found out that I'm in the top 1% of readers on @Pocket!. I read 2,191,432 words in Pocket in 2014. This is more than double of what I read last year.

What's changed

One of the things that I started using this year is IFTTT. I set up recipes to detect new articles from a source and then automatically save them to Pocket. This is basically an RSS feed. This makes reading easier and less time consuming, because articles just appear without me having to look for them.

Reflections

The end of the year is a common time when you reflect on what you did and think about what you want to do moving forward. I like the fact that I am reading a lot, but I can't say for sure what else I can draw from knowing this much. Maybe, I'd be better off reading less, and writing more? Maybe I should be more discerning about what I read?

In any case, the numbers are in, and they are what they are. Onto the next year !

Trying out HackerRank

For the last two weekends, I have been working on problems from HackerRank. HackerRank is a site where you can solve programming puzzles. The challenges require writing a program that ingests some input test cases and returns an answer.

The problems often require understanding some fundamental programming concepts (like traversing trees or choosing the correct data structure). I am hoping that over time it will make me a better programmer.

Even for problems that seem relatively easy to solve, there are often some test inputs that are designed to stress the system. For example, on one problem, I wrote a recursive function to do some work. This worked fine for the sample test cases, but they eventually failed when the data inputs got very large. In order to handle all of the test cases, I had to refactor the code away from the nice, clean, recursive version to something a bit more messier.