10,000 Hours

Becoming an expert at a subject has always been a fascinating subject to me. Obviously you have to put in the work and like any skill the more you do it the better you get at it. I had heard the 10000 hour/10 years of silence theory before and after reading this article again I decided to put a plan in motion to put in some hours over the next year to become a better programmer. To figure out how much I can do in a year I did a little math. In a year there are an available 8760 hours. For most people, 2920 of those hours are going to be used for sleeping and another 2080 will be used for work. This leaves you with 3760 to do whatever you please with. My ideal goal would be to put in 1000 hours of programming but that just seems unrealistic (which means I wouldn't hold myself to it) so instead I'm going for half that which is about 10 hours a week. Starting today I am going to start tracking it along with some other stats I have been meaning to track. Most of my plan deals with becoming an expert at Python and doing more statistic/graph oriented projects. Other things include checking out other languages and writing simple programs just to be exposed to them.

TWiki and Variables

TWiki is a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise wiki, enterprise collaboration platform. I had to deal with a little bit and was trying to figure out how to set and use variables. I couldn't find a good tutorial so here is a small write up on using them.


To set a variable it will look like:
%{CALC("$SET(myVariable, value)"}%


To get a variable it will look like:
%{CALC("$GET(myVariable)"}%

Harvard Intro to Computer Science

I enrolled in the Harvard Intro to Computer Science class. Should be cool. Looks like lots of interesting projects with lots of different subjects touched.