Being Productive

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2024-11-22 02:30:05

Recently I was asked which habits and practices were the secret to my productivity. I figured my answers might be of wider interest. Let me know what works for you!

Why should you listen to my advice? Aside from my papers, in each year of the past decade I've authored ~1k pull requests with ~200k LoC of deltas, with a similar number reviewed:

My first recommendation is to learn as much as possible, about the entire stack you work with - in AI, that's from transistor design and CPU architecture to data centers, internet infrastructure, from assembly to frontend TS. Be able to do any job in the company!

Having the ability to implement and test an idea without needing to convince anyone else that the idea is worthwhile is a productivity multiplier. A solid understanding of all parts of the system also makes it much easier to design algorithms that map well onto the hardware, and to debug tricky problems.

There's a lot of valuable information out there, the main challenge is actually filtering the flood. One great filter are books - they provide information in condensed form, and reviews make it easy to find good books. Due to the slow process of publishing, books are best suited to topics that change slowly, if ever. Think fundamental principles and theories of a field, basic algorithms, etc. For more up to date information, I'm subscribed to the RSS feeds of several dozen high signal-to-noise blogs (<< 1 post/day each), as well as a daily newsletter with the top 30 posts from Hacker News.