What did you get done this year?

Rambling reflections one year after quitting job

After spending the first half of the year teaching myself maths, grinding flashcards, attempting machine learning bounties and various LLM experiments, I decided I needed to change my strategy. I was quite miserable that I hadn’t really achieved any concrete “wins”.

Had I persisted with the maths courses would I feel better off now? Certainly I would have gotten some grades or some other form of tangible feedback from the courses or textbooks to tell me that I was making progress. But progress towards what? I want to be able to solve difficult problems, create useful ideas, become more technical, build a company, do something interesting. - Progress (or lack thereof)

After finishing that post I took a break and decided that my main priority was to get out of Oxford where I had been living for the last three years. Despite my best efforts I hadn’t been able to find or create a social group. It basically just felt fucking depressing living there.

I’ve learned it’s just extremely mentally taxing to something like this by yourself. Starting a small Discord community with friends I met from Twitter and other corners of the internet certainly helped, but I think I need to find similar people IRL, ideally in London where I intend to move very soon.

During the period where I was viewing flats and preparing to move I randomly met a few biology PhDs. They were complaining about wet lab work. They told me they spend hours per day manually moving small volumes of liquids between test tubes using pipettes and often have to babysit experiments on the weekends. I even met a biologist who had developed repetitive strain injury in their thumb from pipetting so much!

They said that the equipment for automating pipetting is very expensive. A Hamilton (as much as $2 million) or Teccan (~$600k) pipetting robot costs well beyond the budget of all but the most well resourced labs. Even a more reasonably priced Opentrons Flex (£60k with all the bells and whistles) is much more expensive than it should be. And this is for a machine that automates just a single operation in a biologist’s workflow.

It started to seem like a promising problem to work on. While I didn’t know much about hardware or electronics the one lesson I did successfully internalise over the last 6 months is that LLMs have made it possible to learn anything. So I started teaching myself the basics of electronics and microcontrollers using a cheap kit from AliExpress and getting GPT to give me little challenges.

I got the hang of 3D design by drawing over reference designs and making small tweaks.

When I moved to London, I moved into a tiny room in a seven person EA house share and turned it into mini factory for hardware projects. My housemate kindly leant me his 3D printer.

By this point I had taught myself enough 3D design, electronics and soldering that I was actually able to build some interesting pieces of equipment. I wrote up a quick post brainstorming ideas for a cheap, automated DIY Bio Lab.

Less than 300 people read that post, but out of the blue someone I’d met at a reading group in London messaged me asking to collaborate.

I started working with them in their engineering lab every day hacking on 3D printable automated lab equipment. Since then we’ve won a robotics hackathon, built prototypes for three pieces of equipment and made a lot of progress towards getting our work in the hands of real researchers.

It’s quite likely that a few of the parts born in my bedroom are going to be used by actual scientists to do real research! That’s pretty hilarious to me.

Returning to the question I asked myself six months ago:

Had I persisted with the maths courses would I feel better off now?

No. The most promising opportunities arise from working on interesting problems, sharing what you made with the world and finding like-minded people to work with. This is the second time I’ve done a year of open-ended search to find what I want to do and it’s exactly the same lesson I learned the first time.

Summary of learnings:

• “People, ideas, machines - in that order!” is literally true in my experience.

• Posting online is valuable even if barely anyone reads your posts.

• Upside from working on interesting problems is much higher than courses.