A reader responds

Hi Pete,

I have some nits with your blog post, in particular two points:

1) ALAN: I found it ironic that you wrote this while you are currently learning something new (neural networks...) while I agree you want to balance learning new things with getting stuff done, I think it’s important to always learn new things.

2) good at one thing vs. multiple. This one struck a chord with me, I think I’m not that good at any one thing: There are people in graphics let alone math with way better math chops than me, same for physics / ME / etc. There are also people with better low level (optimizing code) and high level (software architecture) programming skills than me. I think it is precisely that I am pretty good at multiple different things that has made me successful - most people that are really good at math are terrible programmers, and great coders are often bad at math. I actually think a mixture of skills is super valuable! In games technical artist, or programmers with an eye for art, are super valuable for this same reason.

I think a lot of the advice seemed good and resonated with me, but those two points did not.