I came across various articles that questioned the way engineers learned the most at their job. It resonated very well because that's what I did, and everyone around me. We were a bunch of frontend developers who would learn one framework after the other, then set sights on a newer programming language and then run into something else unrelated. The good that this brings is, individuals with a desire to learn keep themselves occupied. The bad, there is a lack of depth. Ability to navigate through complex problems is not given enough priority. Most blogs tell you how to build something, very few about testing and even fewer that hold your hand and show how difficult can maintaining code be if left unchecked. Sure there are books, but would young energetic minds prefer going through pages? when everything of need is online or would they rather develop software as per the latest hype.

Things are easy. I have made chat applications using nodejs and socket.io during my college days, without knowing what TCP is. At that moment, I didn't even worry about scale or even bother with complexities of building a stable chat server. I was happy that I can talk to someone by sharing a link and know nothing about the inner-workings or user-experience. Luckily, the only thing of utility I learned was: a security flaw in the code which could let someone execute javascript on the other side. I hadn't known what an XSS is until someone started sending me a "hello" in a js alert. Shortly afterwards, the person could delete messages and send the tokens in my localStorage to them. It was embarrasing when that happened, but looking back I knew a security concern before I was employed.

Years after being employed, I have concerns about my ability as an engineer. Learning at a job became difficult as time is not abundant in nature. Thoughts needed to solve problems within a deadline are not the same that are need to solve the same problem with elegance. I needed more opportunities to educate myself. I collected huge amounts of books, courses other reading materials from the internet in my bookmarks and they kept waiting for me. I had long forgotten about each one of them.

I have seen some organizations which offer 1-week, all-paid compulsory vacation. Talking about mental health can be difficult at work, but there are jobs where stress builds up and it is very easy to ignore personal wellbeing leading to anexiety, sleeplessness. In the light of it all, it seems fair to offer such compensation. This left me thinking about intellectual well-being. If I were to ask myself about qualities of my decision making and problem solving abilities, would the answer be satisfactory? Isn't workplace stress a byproduct of poor intellectual health?

I think it is. I have some leaves saved and decided to give a study vacation a try. I want to improve my machine learning foundation and programming proficiency. These are the resources I am considering for each:

• Machine Learning foundation:

  • Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
  • Statistical Inference

• Programming proficiency; This is not as clear because I am interested in learning:

  • Rust
  • Cuda programming
  • The Algorithm Design Manual

Also, this video helps.