Reflections for 2020
There are so many things happening in 2020. Even though most of them are purely bad news to the world, I still want to write down my reflections, as a record.
CFA
After I passed the CFA Level I Exam in last December, I have prepared for the Level II Exam since early last year, for the exam in June. It is pretty unfortunate that the exam schedule was greatly affected by the appearance of COVID-19, and the exam was delayed to later December. After resting for a while, I started to again pick up the exam preparation some time in July and spent most of my after-work hours on it. However, early in October, the CFA constitution again sent out the exam cancellation email to every candidate in US.. I am now pretty pessimistic about the exam availability in 2021..
Work
It has already been 1.5 years since I joined Roblox. So far, I have never doubted my decision — not only my horizon was greatly broaden because of the teammates around me, I also picked up many practical skills from actually having my hands on challenging tasks — from building up the very first Airflow daily reporting pipeline in my team, to integrating C++ HyperScan Library to C# code base and successfully reduced the latency of a critical service by 95%.
Among all the greatness in my team, the most I appreciate is the fact that the majority of ideas actually comes from engineers. Every once a while, our team would brainstorm ideas that could make Roblox better and kids safer on our platform — we need to not only come up with something innovative but also defend those thoughts by ranking their importance and execution difficulties. It really helps me learn how to prioritize tasks from a product or company perspective.
Research
Even if I keep reminding myself of saving some spare time for side research projects, it is in fact pretty hard to find time for them. The only half product I have is trying to learn interactive terms for features under a different learning framework — instead of training model 
, I am more interested in 
. However, I haven’t derived the Hessian Matrix for it, nor thoroughly tested its performance.
AI For Trading
This is a new Nanodegree program that I picked up from Udacity early in the December — after I realized my CFA exam was cancelled and I have rested/wasted my life for a while. I think it is a great course, especially for those who want to pick up the knowledge that connects computer science (mostly algorithms and machine learnings) and finance (specifically, quant trading). By its design, it should take one up to six months to finish all the courses, given 10 study hours per week, but I am trying to put double or triple time into it to save the tuition cost, which is charged monthly 
Miscellaneous
Probably it is because of the quarantine, or it is just because of the fact that I have stayed in my comfort zone for too long, I start feeling numb about money itself. Other than feeding myself properly, I really don’t know how to use them wisely. Just as I said to myself a while ago — what I have earned so far is still far insufficient to buy a house in good school districts; but if I don’t want to buy a house in my lifetime, I can totally live with what I have now and stop pursing for better positions and higher salaries. Especially after I saw the volatile stock market stealing or granting me several bucks within a day, I started regarding the money I earned as purely numbers in my account, which I would possibly never really spend (if I don’t want to buy a house).
For my money concerns, there are actually surprising amount of Youtubers sharing their stories over their channels. The most common reflections I heard from them was about the early money spending on cars, or houses, or anything that accounts for a significant ratio in their assets — the less money you keep at your staring point, the longer time it takes to compound your asset to a desirable level. It actually made me wondering how much is too much for me, given my current earning level.
Among all the Youtube videos, I was most impressed by one of them, which discussed about the money one needs before having Financial Independence, Retire Early (F.I.R.E). I remember I came up with a number that was five times larger than the one suggested by the Youtuber herself, who is a financial advisor. Probably, I am just too pessimistic about how money works?
Resolutions for 2021
In terms of the resolutions, let me be a little bit greedy this time!
CFA
Given there are still lots of uncertainties to COVID, I am now aiming for CFA II exam by the end of the year. Hopefully, everything would go smoothly this time.
Work
I don’t expect much change to my current daily work — it would be great if I could be assigned more exciting and challenging works in the following year. There are already many fun ideas that I think could have huge impacts to the company. I will be very interested in having them by the end of this year!
Research
I feel that it is hard to debate whether something would work or not in my head only — so I will try to put more of my thoughts down, either in words or codes, and try to share them for feedbacks. Most important of all, I should dedicate certain time weekly or biweekly for research brainstorming only.
Health
Finally, it is about time for me to put more emphasis on this — right after I figured out my weight has been skyrocketing. I don’t have any detailed plan of losing weight by now, but my checkpoint would be losing one kilogram a month. Considering that I might fly back to Taiwan some time during the year, I think I should aim for losing 1.5 kilograms over the months in US.
Miscellaneous
In this new year, I hope that I could find out a more healthy way in viewing the money itself. Before that, I guess I would just keep accumulating them as most people do — probably it is time to seek for a second source of income, such as becoming a YouTuber (?) and/or trade stocks programmatically? We will see.