My Top 10 Tips for Now!

My Top 10 Tips for Now!

Okay. I’m an academic and I love learning, but there are times in your life when you take a step back, and really reassess your place in this world. With many of us in lock-down, this could be that time. So, I’m going to give you my 10 pieces of advice. Note they are only mines, and there’s a billion others that you could listen to. Overall, most relate to education and innovation, as it is these things which will hopefully help rebuild our economy after its current shock.

My advice for this lock-down:

1. Go learn something new, and learn it deeply. Buy some e-books, and read, and push yourself. Too often in this world of technology, we surface learn, and struggle to get past the most basic of concepts. Professional certification may get you that promotion, but do you really understand the complexity of what lies undernealth? To understand how we can best build this new world of technology, we must be engineers and not technicicans. We must be leaders, and not followers.

2. Go learn Python, and if you know Python, go learn Go, and if you know Go, go learn Rust. The days of the spreadsheet are past, the rise of Python is here, so go learn it, and do something useful. I personally still struggle with its syntax, but with libraries such as NumPy, it is an environment made for building real things.

3. Be critical, but also be positive, and find solutions. There are too many people who just like to say “No!”, but never find a solution. So, help others with a critical approach to things, and find weaknesses, but be ready with the solution, as the solution might be the next great thing.

4. Don’t just code for the sake of it, build real things. I find coding for coding’s sack so boring. I have no interest in whether a linked list works faster than a pointer array, I just want to build real things. So think of a problem, and go and solve it with code. Go force yourself out of your confort zone, and forget about your Windows desktop, and get yourself a Raspberry PI, and setup it up as a server. Plug cables in, and get your own network setup, and run real code.

5. Go register for the MSc/PhD you’ve always want to do. You may be at the top of the tree in your professional, but you may still have gaps, so go and do that academic thing that you always wanted to do, and be amazing at it! With all that experience under your belt, it will all make so much sense now.

6. Go learn some crypto and machine learning … honestly, these methods are rebuilding our flawed world, so don’t just learn the acronyms, learn its magic. Public key encryption is one of the most wonderful things to learn, so go and learn it. Honestly, the minute you say, “I understand RSA now”, will be a wonderful feeling!

7. Go read a great research paper … it doesn’t have to be a recent paper, just pick one that you can dive into, and live and breath the paper for a week or so. Even with heavy maths, try and understand what the core concept is. Think about it, and try and understand its impact, and what the writers are trying to get you to think about. What’s it change? Where might it be used? It takes a special eye to spot when something amazing is happening, and the best innovators often pick up a paper and say, “Ah, drop everything, this is the new way forward”, but to do this, you have to be able to read papers well. Personally I love old and classic papers, often the ones which were typed on a typewriter, but which have truely changed our world. The RSA paper, for example, has been cited over 25,000 times: here, and is now building a new world of trust. A little tip is to go to Google Scholar, and search for papers, and note the number of citations. A recent paper with lots of citations, looks to be a winner:

8. Go help a great innovator, or be an innovator. The people who start great companies are often innovators. They are people who examine things, and wonder about their flaws. With innovators, there’s the same old companies. Our world is made special by people who reject the status quo, so go be that person, or help others.

9. Sow seeds now. At a time of difficulty, some of the greatest companies have been born. If you feel out of control with a changing world, then get in a take control of your own destiny, but build that great team who can take on the world, and win.

10. And my last one … be a great teacher to others, listen to others and pass on that most precious of gifts … knowledge!