Waiting for the Moon?
We waited for the moon to start Ramadan, and we are waiting for the moon again for the end of Ramadan. That's normal, but for some reason I'm waiting for a sign to start and stop doing what I want to.
By the time you read this, it will already be Eid, so Eid Mubarak to whom it may be applicable to. I haven’t been getting sleep lately, so this newsletter won’t be as much of a fever dream like it usually is. Yes, as the subtitle reads, it is the month of Ramadan. A month of forgiveness and focus. I’m here to tell you how my month went. But first, for those who don’t know me…
I’m Neeor. A self-proclaimed goofball who somehow finds interesting things to do with his life. I am currently exploring Biological Computing, specifically into what biomarkers go off when a certain disease is present. I join some cool programs on the side to network and make friends with people cooler than me. My dream is to either live in high-tech society or completely off grid with no Wi-Fi and lots of cows.
I’m aware the vibe of the song probably won’t relate to the rest of this post.
Ramadan, for those who don’t know, is a holy month for Muslims. We fast from sunrise to sunset every day, (yes, even water), and are encouraged to pray as much as possible. Many people tend to drop all their extra work and devote themselves to Islam for the month of Ramadan. This includes prayers that go deep into the night (taraweeh) and reading the Quran from front to back.
This was my priority over March, spending hours a day praying at night, reading Quran, and overall trying to be a better, kinder person. One thing that became very apparent to me is that our environment will change us. I could’ve done all this during another month, less ROI in the afterlife but could’ve been done. It’s not the only reason, but one of the reasons I did everything I did is because everyone was, not in a following the leader situation, but to be part of the community.
There isn’t much to say about Ramadan that isn’t just about religion or how I connected with Allah SWT (god). But I will describe some and sins & values in Islam that you may actually want to adopt or stay away from. Not because of Islam, but because it’s morally good to live by.
BAD: Harassment of parents
After Allah, your parents deserve the most love and respect out of everyone in the world. Do not treat them harshly, and be grateful for them.
BAD: Consuming the property of the orphan
Using the money of those in need, or the orphan. This also goes hand in hand with donating more, and being more generous to those in need.
Whatever you give, you will be paid back for in full and more, either in this life or the afterlife.
GOOD: Honesty and Patience
Unless it is a white lie towards your spouse or similar, always tell the truth. It will reward you more in the long term, no matter how much it hurts you now.
GOOD: Modesty and Silence
Keep your special self for your special ones. Don’t engage in gossip or backbiting in which you could slander another person. It’s a waste of time.
Spring Challenge: Microsoft
I don’t go into depth of what TKS is, but in short, it’s a human accelerator for those interested in joining the tech world. Now with that being said, we get to participate in seasonal challenges, where we get the opportunity to solve a real problem that a company might be facing, almost like a consultant.
During the Spring Challenge, we got a chance to work with Microsoft, to provide a solution to scaling Azure data centers sustainably and make more revenue. What our team decided on was partnering with a company called Cerebras Systems. They essentially make processing chips the size of a dinner plate, allowing them to more than 80x many metrics such as core count, total memory, and more, in a more dense space.
Before I go further, wanted to thank my team for working so hard and making this recommendation deck as amazing as it could be. Salomé Blandón Atía, Alpana Siddareddi, Salma Elzayat, we wouldn’t have been able to make an amazing deck without their skills and talents.
Anyway, we found this could get them 6x more revenue per unit of space, and allow them to train models larger than GPT-4 on a single chip. It’s a pretty banger deal, and the only downsides we found were liquid cooling, cost, and less inference capabilities. I won’t be posting the deck online yet, but I’m happy to share details down in the comments.
As project manager for the challenge, I was both in my element and out of it. I very naturally take the leading role in any given situation, but managing a project required more discipline, keeping both the team and myself on track. At times, you have to be less of a friend and more of a manager, and as a self-proclaimed goofball that felt weird to me, but I think that accountability is important. While I learned lots about teamwork, what I found more valuable was finding a new way to learn stuff from scratch. Here is my learning method:
Reddit is schooling me (title of the notepad I created)
Go through an advanced thread on Reddit, online article, or a technical YouTube video, and go through it, taking note of what you don’t know
Very high chance you’ll have a full lined page of things you don’t know, depending on the depth of the content and how inexperienced you are
Search up every term and number you didn’t know the meaning of
Start connecting the dots between the things they talked about in a mental or physical mind map. This will involve more google searches.
Now review the content with your newfound context, you’ll understand way more, and actually learn more than what the content just gave you.
This method helped me learn so much about AI-chips, data centers, chips and manufacturing, the math required to train AI models. Honestly, I just found this way of learning almost revolutionary. Then again, many of you reading probably knew about it, so I think it’s time I get off my high horse.
Update on Blue Ocean Competition: We got into the top 100. Super proud of my team for this. Stay tuned for once we make it to top 20.
While school did take up some time with IB and all, that’s where the majority of my time went. There is one more cool thing that happened though.
TKS is getting an upgrade in Calgary
TKS is getting a huge boost in Calgary, with 256k in funding for next year, in hopes of fostering the next generation’s innovators. This is huge for TKS because this is funding room the government, not some external organization. I’m happy to have represented TKS on the announcement panel.
Now, with that out of the way, I wanted to have a closing takeaway that I think everyone can learn from. It’s called ‘Do what makes sense’.
This is where I come full circle with the subtitle I had at the top. I keep waiting for a sign to start the project that really didn’t need to take this long. That sign was never coming because, newsflash, it was procrastination.
Doing what makes sense may seem obvious at first, and probably even more so for all the adults reading this. Don’t do what saps your energy, or wastes your time, and do more of what actually works and gives you energy. This is basic stuff, but it goes further.
The thing that the owner of a company, a founder, a CEO, does, is just make decisions based on what makes sense. All the information comes to them, and then they make a decision that is best for the company. They can only make such amazing decisions because of the top-down experience, talking with smarter people, and mental models.
Now, if we zoom back into our lives, what can we evaluate to make sense and not make sense. In my life, I didn’t do what makes sense because I was chasing dopamine. Whether that was anime, Elden Ring, just chatting in the group chat. None of this makes sense for my future, and it would be better to have a balance rather than almost be an addict towards these things.
For your life, it might be realizing that checking emails all day every day isn’t the best use of your focus. Maybe it’s realizing that the way you explain things to your peers or students isn’t actually helping them, despite you following the same method for years. It could also just be questioning the norm because the way you do one task is inefficient or not yielding the majority of results.
Doing what makes sense feels obvious, but if you apply mental models like First Principals, Nth Order Thinking, Inversion, and more, you’ll be able to make your life that much better and more efficient. And also make better decisions in any situation.
I’ve personally used it to make my own life more effective recently, (by recently I mean nearing the end of March), by just staying away from what will potentially make my life worse, and thinking through most of the decisions I make through consequences.
That’s about wraps for my March newsletter. Definitely had more things going on but didn’t want to make this instance too long. Thanks for making it this far. Wanted to give a special thanks to Steven, Andres, my challenge team, and everyone else who was part of this month especially during Ramadan that made this year’s Ramadan special. Maybe the sleepless and 2 hours of sleep nights were well worth it.
As always, you know where to find me if you want to see my life and what else I’ve worked on. (Hint hint, it’s the button)
Neor, you are so hot