Unmesh Mali

Unmesh Mali

Week 15, 2022

I came across an article written by the author of “Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals” and the author talks about looking at your life as a series of 4000 weeks. This perspective makes me realize that life has an expiry date and all life decisions must be viewed through this lens. I thought it was a powerful thought experiment and I’ll try to inculcate this thinking.

Work ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

I started working at Rivian as an Algorithms Engineer in their energy and charging team. Now, I have moved from creating algorithms for stationary battery storage solutions to stationary + mobile battery storage solutions. If you think about it, at Sunverge I was writing code to optimize a battery with 13-15 kWh of energy capacity. At Rivian, along with a similar stationary battery size, I get to optimize a 135 kWh of battery capacity through the electric vehicle. Another way to look at this is – an average American household energy consumption is anywhere between 20 – 70 kWh per day. Now imagine a future where everyone is driving an electric car, the household consumption increases to 150 – 200 kWh. Optimizing the consumption of such large amounts of energy would have a lot more impact than just stationary storage. I am very excited to contribute to this wonderful future. It has been 6 weeks since my first day at Rivian and I have already started working on core algorithms. The team is great. I am working remotely full- time now. I do miss biking to ## work everyday at Sunverge. In absence of that and increased workload, my physical exercises have sharply declined.

Projects ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

I have started learning cloud technologies specifically AWS. I began with a course on AWS IoT. At Rivian, we have some interesting AWS IoT projects going on. It would be great if I can get some hands-on experience with those projects. Also, there are amazing folks with extensive cloud technologies knowledge and experience. It would be cool to learn from them.

Books ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Life after Google | George Gilder

This book has been a drag. It’s been over 6 weeks that I am reading this book and I am only half way through. It isn’t very interesting and I have to work extra hard to get myself to sit with it. And I feel bad when I leave book unfinished. I hope I can take some time out next week to finish this book off and start a new one that’s more rewarding.

Fitness ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Fitness has been dwindling. Let’s look at some data here. The last weekly blog I wrote was in December 2021.

My performance hasn’t been too bad thanks to the game of volleyball. However, in terms of strength training it hasn’t been fruitful. I need to pick up some pace for this month of April. Ideally, I would like to set a new record for 2022 in this month. That would mean beating the January’s best of 24 hours and 22 minutes. To be able to get there, I’ll need to average at least 1 hour of exercise every single day for the rest of the month. This is going to be interesting.