After just a month of working at Muse, I realize that summer is already halfway over. The time passed by so quickly, I didn't know that I was enjoying the summer that much. In July, I pushed out a video, got a taste of the working life, and learned a little bit of Machine Learning.
If I want to describe myself in a sentence, I'm a regular person, with irregular goals. I'm a young graphic designer, web developer, and BCI developer based in Toronto. I write articles on things that I find interesting and relevant. In my spare time, I listen to music, play video games, exercise, and play basketball.
After school ended I fell into a hard slump. I was sleeping late, wasn't working on anything. waking up at 11am, etc. I forgot the basics and it was starting to affect my work quality. I was feeling tired at around 2pm and I was eating at irregular times. I had to go back to the basics: sleeping early, eating healthy, exercising often, going outside, and meeting new people.
Sleeping and eating right was really just a priority change. Do I want to stay up late talking to friends, or get up in the morning feeling great? Do I want to eat those tasty chips or that plum? Once I got into the momentum of eating and sleeping properly again, things became much easier.
However, exercising was a bit more difficult. I was sick of working out from home, so I compensated by going outside to play basketball and meet new people who I played with. But I needed to do strength training and proper cardio, so I'm signing up for a gym this month.
After I fixed the basics, I feel a lot better throughout my days. I have more energy, and I feel that I'm more productive (even though it might be just a placebo). I still have a lot to learn about maintaining my productivity, but I feel that I am making progress.
The first month of my internship was a lot of fun. I learned a lot about working in a team, and the development workflow, among other things. It was great meeting everyone in the company and be able to ask someone for questions if I needed help. It's a much different experience than what I've had before where I had to figure out everything by myself. Although I learned a lot by figuring out everything, it's nice being able to tap into a Ph.D.'s knowledge sometimes.
My internship is focused mainly on Research & Development, but also some software development on the side. I help develop new sleep protocols for their (new) Muse S' sleep content and educational content on how to use these new protocols.
They develop these "digital sleep pills" (weird name I know, it's like Muse is a drug dealer) to help people go to sleep easier with content that reacts to your biosignals. It's pretty cool as I could create a protocol that would wake me up in light sleep at around 7am and it would work, I wouldn't feel groggy. There's a lot of potential with this tech so I'm super excited to be working with Muse!
This video took a lot longer than it really should have, but it's done! I had a lot of fun with this project and learned quite a bit when building it. The knowledge that I got from this project and the problem-solving skills that I got are really helping me with the current BCI project that I'm working on right now. I hope you enjoy this interesting twist on my neurofeedback project!
This quote is from Naval Ravikant. I forgot exactly where I came across this quote, but at the beginning of this month, as I was going to sleep this quote crossed my mind. It was weird but I started to question my own drive and curiosity. I was wondering if I was truly enjoying my work and if it felt like play. Does my work feel like play? Turns out, some of it didn't. Throughout the year I took on a lot of commitments just because I thought they were interesting, but I didn't enjoy a lot of it. I didn't enjoy the process, I didn't enjoy the output, it was overall just... work... I made it a point to cut out all of this unenjoyable work out of my schedule. As a result, my life felt so much freer. It did suck to say no to some opportunities, but in the end, I feel a lot more rested and happy in my days. Now I wake up, happy to work at Muse, and on my side projects.
I'll be updating you guys once again on the stuff that I'm doing at Muse as well as finish a BCI project that's really exciting. I hope to also learn a lot of Machine Learning by the end of August, but we'll see.
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