Tilting at Windmills

My time the past couple days:

• Writing Project Euler solutions in Ruby, using the "get it done, get it fast, get it good" (alt: make it X) philosophy
• Realizing that I could no longer write the Python code I wrote less than a year ago
• Crushing it on phone interviews that I didn't plan on having anyway
• Faceplanting on an in-person interview that I should have been able to do better on
• Writing and analyzing algorithms with people at the office
• Taking on projects that sound interesting until you realize that you're trying to bite off way more than you can chew

It's important to stay busy with productive work, but it's tempting to think that what you're doing is valuable when in truth the marginal utility is pretty low.

In other news, it's interesting to see how natural writing Project Euler solutions is in Ruby compared to Python. I have many fewer head-scratching moments when it comes to the natural plan of attack—generally, I can just implement the solution that comes to mind, and it runs well enough. Project Euler is, I think, like Alaska: it's not where you learn, it's where you prove yourself. It just happens to be the biggest name in toy programming problems, and many people assume that it's good at teaching you… something.

Not sure what else to say. I'm trying to keep at good habits, and I started thinking about what I wanted to write on the train in today, but then I started thinking about how to build an Abstract Syntax Tree in Ruby (and whether I really need to in the first place, to do what I'd like) and lost what I was going to write. Oh well. More practice; back to the grind.