• Building momentum and having a tight feedback loop are essential for productivity – see How to Build Anything Extremely Quickly.
  • When you’re thirsty for soda, just drink sparkling water instead – it’s the fizziness that you crave.
  • Always, always, apply what you learn – don’t fall into tutorial trap, it’s a subtle form of procrastination.
  • Spreadsheets are extremely good for aggregating experiment data.
  • jq and xsv are your friends.
  • Don’t write one-off commands and then rely on history to find them – start with a script instead.
  • Try to learn various programming paradigms – it enables you to approach problems from different perspectives.
  • It doesn’t matter what text editor you use, as long as you’re productive and comfortable with it.
  • Tiling window managers are indeed nice, but sometimes you want something that just works, without spending too much time configuring and tinkering.
  • You’ll be more determined to maintain discipline (and thus to form a habit) if you get an immediate reward – e.g. when exercising, use a watch that keeps track of personal records.
  • A solid statistics background is way more important than trying to keep track with the latest buzzwords in deep learning.