Aniket Dhuri

Travel and culture had been my focus till the year 2020 restricted travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The self quarantined life helped me focus on other things which I hadn't been able to focus on due to lack of routine. This post describes my 2020 quarantine journey.

Disclaimer -

This post isn't to brag about how much stuff I have been involved in.
If I have shared this with you, that means that I want you to collaborate with me on projects, or I can help you with your journey if you want to learn these things,
You do not have to do all of these things. I started slowly with 1 task a week - month and added more till I could handle it.
At no point were all these done at the same time. :-)

I can classify the journey into language, music, exercise, technical learning, technical projects, mentoring and fun.

Before we start the journey, a friend of mine introduced me to a course on coursera.org - Learning to learn. Before I started the course, I used some of the techniques mentioned in the course. If you are struggling with procrastination or want to learn how to learn, do try it out.

Language

I started learning Spanish in 2018 before I traveled to Peru. I used an app called Duolingo, joined a class at a community college and could speak basic sentences which were enough to have converse with taxi drivers. I made up my mind to learn Spanish fluently by 2019 so that it could help my travels and get me in touch with locals to understand their culture, but I was hit by procrastination.

2020 gave me enough time to focus on learning the language.

I took a professor led course at a community college that helped me learn through spaced repetition and homework.
App Duolingo seems so much easy now after spaced repetition. I use it for 15 mins everyday during my morning routine which forces me to never skip learning.
App Tandem got me in touch with people all over the world who are ready to talk to you in their language and you teach them languages you know. The app is good for casual conversations and to practice speaking.
Whatsapp group with friends who were interested in learning. This learning mode failed after a month when the discussions faded away.

Music

The music journey began for me in 2014 when I bought my first guitar. The original motivation was to play lead songs, but a friend got me interested in chords, scales, and intro to music theory. I couldn't play the guitar well enough to perform at a gathering because I didn't practice much. I started learning piano in 2017 through community college run classes. The professor gave a good intro to Jazz and Blues music, chords and music theory. I couldn't play piano by ear which demotivated me and made me think I wasn't cut out for music. I bought more instruments - ukelele, flute, and harmonica.

For the last week, I have been practicing harmonica. It came naturally and I could play a tune just by looking at which scale it could be played in ( trial and error). A trick that I use to play it everyday is to keep it right next to the TV remote. When I feel like watching TV, I see the harmonica lying there and I play it instead of watching the TV. Another thing which helps me form habits is compartmentalizing my apartment. I have dedicated spaces for office work and personal work.

Harmonica through the youtube channel - LearnTheHarmonica. This gives me good exposure to western music.
Music theory coursera certification

Exercise

I took biking as a hobby in 2014 when I started using it for my daily commute in Bangalore ~ 13 kms everyday. I continued the hobby in 2017 after moving to California ~ 12 miles everyday to work and have done multiple rides - 50 miles being my longest till now. I was very comfortable with cycling and really enjoyed it. I used to complain about having a weak core but never did anything about it.

I tried out apps like sworkit but didn't continue for long. About 2 months back, my wife introduced me the youtube channel Fitness Blender. I liked their videos since they seem like normal fit people who work out daily, and encourage you to be really athletic rather than just "look" fit.

Focus area of workouts

Core strength and abs
Upper body strength
Lower body strength and flexibility

Biking - 100km challenge for a single ride.

Technical Learning/Projects

I enjoy working on technical projects. Apart from work related projects, I wanted to use my time to focus on learning new interesting technologies. I started exploring quantum computing by learning Microsoft's QDK. It led me to a series of other technical discoveries like WSL2 - run linux in windows and not virtualization, more python related findings. This continued for a month, until I was interrupted by a work-related project that requires a graph database. I found the Family tree project that could be awesome with a graphDB and thought this could be a good opportunity to use my time getting Neo4j certified.

Neo4j certification - The course requires me to spend min 7-8 hours and I have been spending atleast an hour everyday for spaced repetitions and also doing the additional optional reading.
Quantum QDK - Before QDK, I have been reading on quantum gates ( just like classical computing gates - AND, NOT etc). Quantum could be the future we are moving towards and learning it now would help think about problems that cannot be solved today. QDK gave me handson to learn programming in Q#. This has been spaced repeated again ~ 2-3 hours every week. This learning is on hold till the certification exam on Neo4j is completed.

Projects

Family Tree

Goal - Family tree web app to build your family tree using graph db ( neo4j)
Integration with facebook + ability to add the information yourself - to pull the data and do personal queries like - how old is my cousin?
Reach out to me if you are interested.

Travel Buddy

Goal - Let your social friends know your future travel plans, so they could reach out to you early and join you.
Reach out to me if you are interested.

Plant my water

Goal - Water my plants.
There are multiple projects available online based on raspberry pie, sensors etc. I want to do a project that does a similar thing without the additional overhead of sensors.
Later, try building this using old phones as computing to trigger motor to water the plants. The goal here is to encourage people in the world to use their old smart phones lying around in their house to trigger such projects.
I got motivated into IoT side of projects through - Squirrel Proof Bird feeder

Mentorship

The same friend who introduced me to the course 'Learning how to learn' started an initiative to help students and people who are interviewing. The mentorship program is mentee driven and would be done till the decided goal is reached. I have 3 mentees currently. I spend 1-2 hours every week per mentee to talk about their goal and have an agenda for the week

Mentee1 - goal to work in a field they never worked on - Big data. This helped me brush up my understanding on the topic. We read several papers till now and the mentee curently has a project for the summer.

Mentee2 - goal to switch job and work in a field they haven't worked in. They found system design discussions very helpful and it helped me brush up on several topics - caching, distributed systems, etc.

Mentee3 - goal to learn new stuff. We are still working out on priorities before we could start discussions related to system design etc.

Fun

This is very important. Life without other fun stuff would be boring. I spend time catching up with friends in different time zones. Playing and creating maps for CS GO with college friends. Baking food that I would have never baked (cake, pastry cream, bread, pizza etc). Gardening - planted flower plants, now preparing our patio for herbs and vegetables.