This year, 2024, was a big year for me in terms of self-reflection. The company I had built for 5 years was acquired, and my life shifted into a “what’s next” phase, leaving me suspended in a kind of void, feeling lost, and a bit depressed.
I knew that I wanted to focus on more meaningful projects, to contribute to helping people and nature, to grow - but not having anything there to achieve this. There have also been a lot of layoffs this year, finding work has been challenging, along with the boom in AI, and it left me wondering what’s next, what has longevity, if anything, and what can I do to perhaps stand out a little.
Through my exploration, I (by mistake) stumbled upon quantum computing, and ended up doing IBM’s Quantum Challenge to get to know a little bit more about it. As someone who does not have a strong physics or math background, I found the challenge incredibly, well, challenging, but also incredibly rewarding when I crawled over the finish line along with a couple dozen others. This experience has led me wanting to dive into the world of quantum computing. It’s very new, deeply imperfect, confusing, but also incredibly (potentially) powerful, and, to me, will most likely change the world in a profound way. All of these reasons make me want to understand it, but also hopefully be able to utilize it in my career and to help people and nature, and who knows, maybe to gain some kind of longer term fulfillment.
I’ve also found through my year of reflection, that I do not learn very well by taking courses and reading. Sure, they are nice as supplementary material, but I have found that for all the books and lectures I have read and listened to over the past decade, I have retained very little of it. So I am going to start something new to help me learn, which is to teach.
With that in mind, I’m starting a blog series entirely for myself. I am going to write, and learn and teach to my illusory audience. There is also a second selfish reason for me writing, and that is in an effort to “get myself out there”. As a fairly introverted person, and someone who struggles to retain a network, I figure why not present my writing and teaching to the world. Who knows what it may bring (recruiters are welcome). And yes, I understand my motives are somewhat paradoxical.
I believe software developers are, above all, trained to break down problems and to solve them. So, as a software developer, and one that wants to understand physics (as well as chemistry, biology and other areas that use quantum computing to simulate nature), I am going to break this down, for myself, and so other non-physics, non-chemistry, non-biology people can do the same.
I think something important to note about the quantum information industry is that the knowledge required to do well is very high. Most people active in the industry have a PHd in physics. I believe the barrier to entry will change, but for now, keep in mind that as I learn and write and teach that I do not have this background, and I may be wrong, and I may come at all of this from a different perspective. Despite this lack of foundation, I hold on to a quote from Carlo Rovelli (a physicist!):
We don't get to new places by following established tracks.This series is going to start with some foundational material to get the gist of what’s going on with a quantum computer, and then we will move on to some code, and hopefully some nature simulations because I think that’s the cool part.
If anyone ever reads this, I hope you enjoy it, and the future posts to come.