DIARY OF A MANIAC #2
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Disclaimer
Anything I say in this is by no means teaching, I am also here to learn, we all learn our entire lives, please if you see anything wrong in any of the future or present diary entries, correct me else how will I ever learn? Thank you in advance!
Okay hi reader, I’m Dom, short for Dominik. I do way too much in a week and just added writing to that, here’s a quick intro of me to catch you up if you’re new around here. I started working in FinTech as a programmer.
I graduated Computer Science with a First Class degree after dropping out to work full time then returning to university (and mainly being in work meetings during lectures lol) and I now program in quantitative finance for financial markets.
BUT that’s not all I do, I’m on the extreme side for anything I do, so sleep sometimes is a necessity, I’m young, but I feel f***** old sometimes, don’t we all. So anyway, global warming is real.
The Summer of ‘69
This week started out maybe a little too hot for a lot of peoples’ likings, at least I know it was too hot for me personally. Temperatures of 38 degrees Celsius raged through the dry sands of Cornwall causing wildfires and such, no bueno really. Even in the capital there were reports of train tracks melting and airport runaways doing the same, crazy.
I was working at my stand up desk that I got from Flexispot not too long ago, I like it a lot, I tend to stand quite a little bit during the day, in fact, doing it as I write this. The fan that was on the edge of my desk, about 50cm from my face had 0 effect on the climate of my office. I’m sure you can imagine this was an absolute bliss to work in.
Unfortunately, as I don’t function anywhere as well in hot climates as cold ones, productivity wasn’t that great on Monday, writing this, it’s currently Tuesday and today was surprisingly quite a productive day, not from a research or programming side but more so from a trading side.
Had one of my best trading days in a long time and it felt really good, specially considering the conditions. I felt really in sync with the market and anything I was thrown at I was able to react to very quickly, catching moves of up to 13% of an impulse, selling the top and not looking back.
I think it’s really important to be able to not have a bias in these market conditions specially when many of us spend so much time on CT (Crypto Twitter).
It’s always good to clean up your feed and get rid of people you don’t think make the cut or just don’t talk to, “I followed you but I don’t know why so goodbye”. Anyway, my point here is that lot of the times we could take in so much information from these “dimfluencers” who, yes, made a lot of their money from previous cycles,but, also share their reflink an absurd number of times.
We’re all just here to speculate, if you’re a great counter-trade you become a tool.
Research
The main focus of this week’s research was not anything to do with QuantDev. I was focusing more on my own dashboard that I’ve had as one of my yearly goals to complete. I have a lot of scripts and I’ve been meaning to create a unified dashboard to remove the need to use different ones daily and create some sort of comfort in having everything in one single page, yet alone window. This of course, doesn’t just provide comfort but also efficiency in my daily workflow substantially reducing many mundane tasks.
I have finished writing up a React Web app as the template website which helped me learn ReactJS alongside it. I didn’t expect the tutorial to be so detailed but it actually teaches you about many things that to be honest, even a seasoned React developer can enjoy such as using the StateContext library across your app for theming and many other things.
From my limited front-end knowledge, whenever I tried to build a website really quickly my first choice was always “Bootstrap”, which is just essentially a CSS library with presets. It was great to find out that there are other, better alternatives like Tailwind. On top of all this, creating very visually appealing charts to show statistics on a page in combination using Syncfusion made this setup very good in my eyes. Here’s a partial page from the website with just an area chart, you can see and imagine how useful this can become and how appealing it is to the eye.
For the tutorial check it out here: link
Besides this, I have thought about what I now need to do in order to continue with this project, with many of my libraries being in python it’ll be a little painful to transfer it all over, but all I really need is just the data.
The approach will most likely include me building an API using Python just to utilise everything and balance the load between my back and front end.
The 2nd part of the week consisted of doing some research into package managers and compilers for JavaScript. After sharing with my followers on Twitter that I am working with React they’ve quickly said “you should look into Vite over Webpack”. Sooo, I did exactly that.
Migration of existing project that was bootstrapped using CRA (Create-React-App) seemed to never work even after trying it 3 different ways from different articles.
So I did what any maniac would do and just created another folder and bootstrapped a completely new project using Vite with their sample React template and merged the files manually. On the other hand, while my NPM was installing my node modules I also looked and did a little research into using Yarn over Node Package Manager (npm).
The TL;DR of it all is that yarn is overall much better for performance and execution as it reads and installs the packages in parallel and not sequentially like NPM.
Vite and Webpack also have similar stories except from a different approach. What do I mean by that? Well, Vite has a longer production build time and slower development startup but as from my experience too, it has ridiculously lightning-fast feedback loop when changes were made to your code without any hard-refresh. On top of all this, while the build time may be hard to beat even with “code-splitting” enabled in Vite vs Webpack, when it comes to reloading new modules it is near instantaneous vs webpacks’ 3–4s.
Anyway that’s all stats and that’s the boring side, I’m sure I am not even scratching the tip of the iceberg for all those performance junkies like myself. (I really am itching to dive deeper into it)
This week’s research wasn’t exactly very theoretical but more so on the technical side, I was coding and researching for what I was coding as opposed to the usual research that I may perhaps use in code one day down the road.
I usually have a lot more fun during these weeks as doing things is where the fun is, writing information down to “maybe” use is too boring and repetitive, nothing sticks, there’s no innovation, I learn best by doing, I won’t remember poop if I just write it down and this is just my personal critical reflection of knowing how I learn.
“Throw 💩 at the wall and see if it sticks” — Albert Einstein (obviously completely legitimate source)
Thoughts
This week was quite challenging with us hitting an all-time-high in temperatures ever recorded for the UK, which I believe was 40.2 degree Celsius, nevertheless I’d say that the productivity was caught up on by the 2nd half of the week.
One thing I realised was that many people say they work great under pressure. I’d place myself into a completely separate category, not necessarily under pressure but extremes; although one might argue it’s one and the same.
As I mentioned earlier, I am a very extreme person, currently my home life has some extremes that need solving and while they’re being worked on it could very well just distract me from what I have to do, and instead of that happening I am just more laser focused. Same with food, I work best when I am starving myself, same with sleep — I work best and discover things that I wouldn’t normally when I am fully sleep deprived. I’ve been catching up on sleep this week but I notice that I am more tired even if I don’t notice it. A good example of this is last night: I fell asleep at my PC sometimes at about 11pm and then slept till 11.45pm, then I went to bed and completely knocked out until about 7.45am. I know, waking up before 8am on a Sunday should be a crime but here we are, I’m an early bird.
The next 6 weeks from next week, I will have my 6yo cousin stay with us over his school holidays so I will be taking up a dad role too in the meantime, I am fine with this, he’s usually here for extended periods of time and he’s a good kid so perhaps I will have more stories on how I chased him around the playground while all the dads gave me the stink eye rather than talk about extremes in life!
As always I hope you enjoyed this week’s diary entry, let me know your favourite parts in the comments below and give me some claps (the Medium reward system to fuel my dopamine receptors).
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