Ask HN: What are you working on?

I read an article on Slashdot about John Carmack where he said, (emphasis mine)

" After I took the job at Softdisk, I was happy. I was programming, or reading about programming, or talking about programming, almost every waking hour. It turned out that a $27k salary was enough that I could buy all the books and pizza that I wanted, and I had nice enough computers at work that I didn't feel the need to own more myself (4mb 386-20!).

I could still clearly remember my state of mind when I viewed other people as being ignorant about various things, but after basically doubling my programming skills in the space of six months, I realized how relative it all was. That has been reinforced several additional times over the seven years since then. "

The phrase "doubling my programming knowledge in 6 months" caught my eye and I thought I'd take a crack at it. I've set aside 6 months to do this. Given my smaller "quantum" of knowledge as a compared to Carmack it should be easier :-P.

So anyway, I've set a fairly ambitious(for me) agenda

(1)work completely through Algorithms by Cormen et al and Randomized Algorithms by Prabhakar and Raghavan, doing every exercise in each book,

(2)become really good at lisp and Forth - write about 10,000 "lines of code" in each language, versions of the HRL library (see below)

(3) release an Open Source java library of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms (something extracted from a consulting project I recently completed.).

I've taken a 6 month sabbatical from my consulting work. It was kind of weird explaining to my clients that I am completely unavailable for the next 6 months, but I think it is worth a try. The bank account looks healthy enough (touch wood). I've been working on this for the last 10 days, averaging 12 hours a day and loving it. .

I'm also working on a startup that hopes to launch this fall.

As an Indy resident, cool to see this is happening at IU.