Peter is a gem who really seems to understand the structure of reality slightly better than just about anybody, and is a nice person to boot.

I guess I spontaneously picked up on the 'challenge yourself a little, improve, repeat' strategy a long time ago. I often implement things over decade or more, through a series of small increments. I also decompose many problems recursively and use a sort of A* approach to make progress, sometimes revelling in some detail for months or more at a time before solving it, then backing up the stack to the larger problem I was working on.

For example, I'm building an automated microscope. I work with folks who buy $1M scopes just to speed up their science. I don't want a $1M scope- I want a $1K scope that does 30% of what the $1M scope does. To do this, i've learned how to design and 3d print components, integrate motors, controller boards, etc. Eventually I reached a point where improving the illuminator (the LED light that provides the light to the sample, which is then picked up by the camera) was the most important step and so I took a deep dive into LEDs, and the electronics required to support them.

This has meant putting the scope down and instead creating a series of designs for PCBs that incorporate increasingly sophisticated electronics and higher power LEDs. I set a challenge for myself that is beyond my ability: design and have manufactured, a working constant current driver and assemble the PCB myself using surface mount components. When I started, I knew nothing about constant current, or SMD, or designing PCBs. I started with the simplest possible designs- copying a reference design for ac ontroller, cloning a board I already have, incorporating low-power LEDs onto a board. Each step along the way, adding something slightly more challenging.

When I do this I fail a lot. Some days I get a PCB made to my design after a week of waiting (JLCPCB is AMAZING) and within 5 minutes realize I made a fundamental mistake. Other times, a board works perfectly and I "level up": I can now take everything I learned in the process, and use it to pick up the next challenge. Sometimes I get frustrated and depressed- not being able to figure out something that should be straightforward, and then I either rubber duck it, or ask a simple/stupid question on reddit, which typically unblocks me.

Today, I expect to receive my next constant current board design. If I assemble that and it works, I can then proceed to building a board to host a high power LED. That will introduce all sorts of new problems (heat management) that involve going into Kicad, thinking about stuff, making some experiments, sending a design to JLCPCB, waiting a week, and then assembling a bunch of boards, most of which will burn out (high power LEDs are tricky, if they got hot they fail faster). There's an opportuntity to buy some thermistors (little temperature measuring devices) and put them on the board to see how well my design for heat spreading it.

At the end of all this, I'll have a world-class transmission light microscope that can track tardigrades for hours at a time (itself an enjoyable delve into modern computer vision techniques), and I've talked to the world's leading tardigrade researcher, who wants to incorporate my ideas into his research to make tardigrades a model organism.

By the way, if I had stayed in academia, I would NEVER had the time, money, or energy to pursue this; I'd be stuck working on my funded research. NOBODY wants to give me money to design scopes that are roughly where state of the art was in the 1970s. But if I keep this up, in a few years I'll be ready to go play with the big boys and girls in the robot biotechnology labs with their $1M toys.

Bringing this back to Peter, I had the chance to work with him on a project (attempting to disprove the Beal conjecture by finding a counterexample). He did all the brilliant math and we wasted a bunch of CPU (and I mean A BUNCH) trying to find counterexamples. I like how when he wrote https://norvig.com/beal.html he wrote in the nicest possible way that I was wasting time and energy.