Over the last month I managed to climb my way up to 970-ish on the chess.com servers before crashing back down to about 800. The rise can be attributed to playing particularly well for a few days, while the crash can be attributed to several things: Firstly, I got a little cocky with the strategy I had been using, and suddenly it wasn't working as well. Secondly, I was experimenting with different themes for the board and pieces (which had a larger effect than I was prepared for, but is temporary). Thirdly, I was experimenting with some risky little unwise strategies that definitely don't work past ~700 or so.
The rise to grand master will be full of peaks and valleys, and I would characterize this peak as a something like a failed rocket launch: spectacular, thrilling, and not really a failure because it can be built upon.
I continue to imbibe lessons from some of the chess books I have been studying, and this continues to improve my game. I am a couple of hundred games behind on manually inputting games into the database, which has not been updated this month. However, over the next couple of months I will likely begin putting together a web scraping system to collect my data from Chess.com and Lichess in order to analyze it without having to input the data manually.
I can't help but notice that this is all perfect for some programming projects, and I am now determined to build a chess engine from scratch. In the past I have experimented with genetic algorithms, and I think it would be a top notch project to create a relatively simple chess engine template with some variables and have variations on it compete within an ELO pool, using genetic algorithms to tweak those variations until they begin to do novel things. Although I will be including decision trees eventually, I think such an approach could yield interesting computer chess opponents well before the decision trees are very advanced.
Although many top notch chess engines exist, none yet exist which have been made by me. I am the kind of learner who learns best from fundamentals, and so building a decent little engine will make me a much better chess player while also giving me a chance to make something neat. I have begun on the first parts of it (I've made simple chess players before), but it will be a few more updates before it is anything to write home about.