Thanks for the advice. I think I understand the idea, but I’m still not sure how to apply it at my level.

Could you give me an example of what you mean by a “long-term project” for someone at my level, and how you would balance it with continuing DSA?

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verdverm 13 hours ago | parent [-]

a project can be something you always wanted to see, or some application that already exists (build your own version from scratch)

the key is that it is big and related/applied to something you like, such as a hobby

my first was a stock picking system (fool's errand), my PhD work was a system to extract math formula from data, post PhD was a deterministic code generation engine (pre-dating LLM code gen)

unfamiliar with the DSA acronym

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jassembk 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah, I see what you mean now. By DSA, I mean Data Structures and Algorithms.

So basically, you recommend choosing something I’m genuinely interested in, even if a similar application already exists, and building my own version from scratch. Then whenever I encounter something I don’t know, I learn it as I go.

	▲	verdverm 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		yup, exactly!