🦋

I feel like the older I get, the more I realize how useless I really am. You might think this as a negative statement, but I see this in a more positive light. I realize how dependent I am to other people. How I can't do everything alone.  And that's good. That is probably one of life lessons that you have to experience yourself in order to understand. There's the famous saying: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Basically it says that you have 2 choices, depending on how you want to achieve your goals, go alone or go together. There's nothing wrong with either option, I think. But that's only if you consider the goal as the only value you seek in the travel. Based on my experience, the goal usually only makes up about 5% of the overall value of the entire process. It's the journey that's really valuable. The long walk. The sweat and blood spilled. The joyful laughters, the swallowed tears. That's what it is really all about. And what is a journey without a companion.

They say that the first step of solving a problem is admitting that it is a problem. It is often the hardest step that one has to overcome. And even if he's overcame that hurdle, it is not impossible for him to change his mind about it, restarting the process all over again. The takeaway from this is to be patient. To learn to just stop every once in a while and take a fresh breath of air. If your problems won't ever leave you, then you have all the time in the world to solve them. Sometimes just thinking about something complicates the matter beyond solving. And if you can't get rid of the bad parts inside of yourself, then maybe you just have to add other more good parts inside to offset the balance a little bit. We can't all be perfect. We make do with what we have, not with what we wish we had.

📚

I didn't have a lot of time to read this month. I did read a few pages of Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick. I'm not sure if I like it or not. It's kinda weird and outdated (?). I don't know that sci-fi story could get outdated, but that's the feeling I got from this book.

💻

After about a month of idling about, I finally started on a new job on the 15th. It has just been two weeks since I started but it's been absolutely insane. In that first two weeks, there were 7 meetings (in which I missed one of them, regretfully) and 3-day marathon of programming. The whole two weeks essentially feel like a week worth of hackathon, but you have to actually finish every features needed instead of just making a good presentation.

I pulled an all-nighter on the first day of the marathon and scrambling between two-or-three-hour sleep and long-hour session of coding/meeting for the remaining two days. Needless to say, I burned out almost immediately on the following days. It took me three days to fully recover. Thankfully I don't get sick easily.

But, it's not all bad, you know. I get to work with a big team on this job. Significantly bigger than everything that I've experienced so far. And it's really cool to have a dedicated set of people to manage different aspects of the project, one for database, one for infrastructure, testing, and so on. I'm used to working with a small team (2-3 people), so I'm a little bit overwhelmed by how many people I have to coordinate things with in order to do my part. I still prefer working on a leaner team though, lol. But it's still a valuable experience nonetheless.

There are still a lot work need to be done from here on. Hope I don't mess up.

🐢

I had a little free time every now and then. And I decided to start a new project called android.seed. After giving it a lot of thoughts, it's finally clear for me that I learn the best by doing. I can read tons of documentation and forget about them the next day, but when I practice them on a problem, I can internalize them better inside my head. And I always want to get better at what I'm doing so that I can do my job faster, so that I can go to sleep earlier. Okay, I probably shouldn't say that around my colleagues lol. But anyway, android.seed is my way of learning stuff. It is a fake social media app, much like my other pending project, Rafflesia. Rafflesia is still in the limbo because I made a fatal mistake that requires a full overhaul of the whole thing. And I'm too lazy to do it lol. But that's another story. I hope I can combine these two projects into one system. That's possible, for sure.