#EngineerChallenge Day 071 

I was not able to post for a while and may not be able to in the foreseeable future. I am, however, steadily making progress in my reviews.

#EngineerChallenge Day 032 

I haven't posted in a while but that's okay. In that time, I was able to recreate my quantified self dashboard in Holoviz's Panel and migrated from Streamlit. I also learned how to plot with Bokeh, and so far the experience with Bokeh seems to be better for the charts I am looking to create than Altair. The quantified self dashboard still lives at https://howis.jskherman.com.

On another front, making flashcards with Anki sure does take a while, especially when you have to cover a lot of material, even when you stick to the essential/fundamental/atomic concepts and derive/deduce from there.

#EngineerChallenge Day 018 

I forgot to post an update for the past few days due to #procrastination. I was thinking how I can get myself to enjoy the process of answering problem sets. To answer this, I made a small script with #AutoHotkey which plays a satisfying sound when a specific key is pressed in order to #Pavlov myself into some #dopamine. It's minor but I think the audio cues help.

I went with a generic sniper shot SFX (attached herewith), since solving a few problems is not worthy of fancy fanfare (unless, of course it's those types of problems that take a long while to answer even though it's just one item) but it seems fitting since what we're doing are attempts at solving and not necessarily that we're always going to "score" a point.

I was ruminating for some days that reading textbooks first and then solving problems might not be the best way to raise my morale/motivation for the answering problem sets. Maybe I could better sustain momentum if I answered problem sets first? Then when I'm stuck I go looking for relevant information so that my reading is motivated, intentional, and clear about what I want to get out of the act of #studying (i.e. not just get to the end of the chapter for progression's sake). A textbook isn't fiction so there's no right sequence to reading it...

On the other hand, I also often get derailed by other inquiries that pop up. I was thinking of relegating those to the backburner and come back to them once my focus wanes from solving problem sets, i.e. #StructuredProcrastination [0], to help maximize use of the limited 12 hours of the day.

[0]: https://www.structuredprocrastination.com

#EngineerChallenge Day 010 

I got "nerdsniped" hard today. I suddenly got some motivation for fixing the #JSONschema for the YAML file that accompanies my repo for creating a #resume with #Typst (https://github.com/jskherman/cv.typ/). I added checks for URLs and other fields that could contain null values in practice. I also started a new cv repository to store all of my #CV and résumé-related data and compiled using my Typst résumé template. I was thinking of using #GitHub actions to automatically compile them on a new git push to the repo and upload them to #Cloudflare R2 to make them available automatically. As such, I was not able to study today.

Yet! I did get some requirements done ahead of time today for registering for the board exam so at least it was not a #ZeroDay. I'm sad though since the streak I have going is reset to zero. I was feeling rather under the weather since it was raining so hard all day. Moving forward, I need to learn how to show up and at least do one Pomodoro session even if conditions similar to today occur. What actions can I take to reorient my frame of mind when I'm lethargic that will make me want to study?

#EngineerChallenge Day 009 

Hmm, based on today's events, I guess the biggest obstacle I have right now to achieving longer sustained study sessions are the distractions associated with my phone. The computer is fine since I mostly use the browser and some programs like SumatraPDF and VS Code. The phone is where most of the distractions lie, with the games, YouTube, and browser bookmarks right there with a few taps away. How to get around this?

On the other hand, I made a little progress with Felder's EOC problems. I kind of dislike working through some of the open-ended questions that do not ask for a definitive/quantitative answer (e.g. sketch the process). It's harder with these types of problems to get clear unambiguous feedback like the ones you get from solving typical math problems in Algebra/Calculus.

#EngineerChallenge Day 008 

It's #Monday and we're going through the motions again. I don't think I take too well to problem sets that ask questions that are open-ended when the topic is supposed to be quantitative and have a definitive answer. I get that the #pedagogy intention is to have the lessons be transferable to a wider context than mere test-taking but it does not help at all when it's for a board exam (test-taking in its epitome). The bigger underlying issue here is that recent #textbooks do not provide good answer keys in the back anymore. It's either odd or even numbers that are given (what about those who self-study and want more practice?!) Sometimes, they are not even complete and only giving answers for specific sub-items a/b/c/etc. It's like the textbooks' pRiMaRy gOaL is targeting professors for pRoFiT and *not* quality #education.

Maybe I should look elsewhere? Or should I stick with it and skip the awkward open-ended questions? I would've liked trying my hand at the open-ended questions if I had the time but it just does not make much sense in a self-studying context. These types of questions are usually reserved for discussion groups.

#EngineerChallenge Day 007 

Today is Sunday, nothing much to report here. I still tried going for a study session to not break the streak I have. On a tangent, I tried my hand creating a wind rose chart and a temperature + humidity Bar/Line Chart from the data I am slowly building up with the use of OpenWeather's One Call API and Pollution API. Still more charts to implement plus filters for the time and parameters to output in charts. See below for an example chart illustrating \(\text{PM}_{2.5}\), \(\text{PM}_{10}\), and the Air Quality Index data for Legazpi City for the past two years.

Example Chart: https://mathstodon.xyz/@jskherman/109895223456744018

#EngineerChallenge Day 006 

Today, was Saturday. It was a slow day, perhaps? I wanted to watch the new Five Nights at Freddy's movie in the cinema but I need to save for future expenses, especially unexpected ones. Ugh, the opportunity cost... 😓 One month of Microsoft 365 or one movie for 1-2 hours? Pragmatically, the former has much more value. How about 5$ worth of #OpenAI credit for use with GPT4 Turbo, GPTs, TTS vs the movie? The former still feels like more value even though I can use ChatGPT for free (GPT4 still better though).

Anyway, I just finished Chapter 4 of Felder's and it seems that this is one of the longer chapters in the book. I'm now off to solve the end-of-chapter problems. For problem sets maybe I should try timing myself as well as making a related dashboard using Streamlit. Along with the weather page, the backlog for the https://howis.jskherman.com dashboard is growing.

On one note, I find it increasingly hard to stare at the screen for long periods of time in order to read PDFs of textbooks. The black on white just gets too glaring, day or night. Looking at something that's of a different distance (usually farther away) from time to time helps.

No clue about how to incorporate exercise in-between Pomodoro sessions still. I kind of don't like the idea of me covered in sweat while studying nor the idea that my arms might get too tired to even press the keyboard. I imagine it to be uncomfortable (not that it helps that the room is already hot & humid in the afternoon). Is it not good of an exercise if you're not trying for reps until failure?

#EngineerChallenge Day 005 

Toady, we're continuing off from yesterday on #ChemicalEngineering material balances and I'm still in the same chapter in Felder's. Today, I realized that I've been solving material balances the hard way all this time! With molecular species balances! No wonder I struggled when it came to combustion reactions. The book says:

> * Atomic species balances generally lead to the most straightforward solution procedure, especially when more than one reaction is involved.
> * Extents of reaction are convenient for chemical equilibrium problems and when equation-solving software is to be used.
> * Molecular species balances require more complex calculations than either of the other two approaches and should be used only for simple systems involving one reaction.

I believe what makes material balances hard as a problem is the part of doing the degree-of-freedom (DOF) analysis at the start. You have to memorize/remember which elements of the problem (no. of unknown variables, no. of chemical reactions, no. of independent species balances, other relevant equations/relations) to add/subtract to get the degrees of freedom. After that is mostly smooth-sailing in solving systems of equations since you've already done the hard part of figuring out the sequence of steps to solve the material balance problem with the DOF analysis. Man, I wish I read this book more closely in my freshman year and not the textbook that was given for the course.

Also more Anki cards! The hard part definitely is creating your cards in the first place. Furthermore, I'm still perplexed on how to sneak in a few sets of exercise in between Pomodoro sessions without me feeling tired...

#EngineerChallenge Day 004 

Re: https://mathstodon.xyz/@jskherman/111375931116400908, today was indeed better than yesterday. I was able to study more than the past few days. What I did different today was switching to a different subject. Sometimes we need some variation for healthy stimulation and there is some research done in educational psychology that supports interleaving. For today, I studied basic material balances and refreshing myself on those, particularly integral balances. For this I had the book by Felder, Rousseau, and Bullard "Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes" to help me.

I was also able to finally start answering my newly created cards in Anki that I made in the days before for General Chemistry. I also tried exercising in the 5-min breaks in between Pomodoro sessions but I found myself, naturally, exhausted and feeling drowsy. I have no idea how to work around this yet.

On the side, I fixed some bugs for the Toggl Track page on my stats website (https://howis.jskherman.com). I hope I can allocate some time soon for adding a weather page displaying Legazpi City and Manila weather conditions.