October, 2021 - Victor Huynh

Change of Direction?

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So after the previous post of getting exposed in an interview, one thing that the interviewers were talking about stood out to me. He had said that even though he thought he was a great developer, when he was exposed to the lead engineer, he didn’t feel like he was up to snuff, and didn’t think it was possible to even get to his level. This sort of thing kind of brought me to the realization that perhaps getting into an area that people already have years of experience and natural drive may not be the best route to “become the best”, per se.

I talked to one of my good friends from University, and he suggested that I try getting into DevOps, as it’s a relatively new, emerging field with lots of interesting technology. Not to mention, that it does have high demand and is necessary for a lot of larger projects down the road.

So, assuming that I can land the position (perhaps not as high position as he recommended, but a DevOps position nonetheless), I am going to prepare myself for this field of study and do my best. To be fair, I felt like I did give JavaScript a fair shot (ok, perhaps a little under what I would consider fair), but CSS just was not it for me. I felt like it was difficult and frustrating to work with, and I remember talking to one of my interviewers about it and they also felt like it was something that I should reconsider (front end position interviews lol).

Oh well, another day, another swap! Run it back, always learning.

Interviewing

Exposed in interview

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As the title says, I got pretty exposed in one of my interviews. As we prodded along the interview, I realized that I didn’t really have a good idea of what I wanted to dive myself into. Metaphorically speaking, it is as if there were many pools, and I didn’t want to get myself wet until I knew which path that I wanted to get into. I never reached a conclusion to which one I wanted to get myself into, there’s just an overwhelming amount of paths I could take in my eyes. The interviewer felt that vibe from me pretty early into the interview, and I couldn’t help but agree that I wasn’t sure which path I wanted to go into, either from a lack of inspiration, direction, conviction, or a combination of either.

I’m not sure if I should employ the “fake it till you make it” strategy and just full-send it. Something to think about

Coding Portfolio

Liar’s Dice Update 1

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So in this blog post, I wanted to give an update (to myself as well lol) to what the current state of my Liar’s Dice attempt looks like.

Currently, I think I’m done the base game logic for a single player, this entails:

being able to roll a set of 5 dice to determine your hand
saving it to a shared (?) state, as a dictionary using useState()
being able to determine if it’s a bluff or not
being able to raise/increment the next call
being able to continue the game after doing the first actions

The next steps that I will have to be focusing on is how to make it (and test it) for multiplayer purposes.

This is where I usually get stuck on in the past (also because I learned useState and didn’t want to refactor everything because I felt like I wanted to see what I thought of at the time — this time I did use React Hooks primarily). I’m hoping to get through this roadblock and figure it out this time around!

Some of the useStates that I’ve used at this point are:

  const [tableHand, updateTableHand] = useState({});
  const [playerHand, updatePlayerHand] = useState({});
  const [diceRolled, updateDiceRoll] = useState(false);
  const [faceSelected, updateFaceSelected] = useState();
  const [quantitySelected, updateQuantitySelected] = useState(0);
  const [previousFace, updatePreviousFace] = useState();
  const [previousQuantity, updatePreviousQuantity] = useState();

I wonder if I’ll figure out a better way to implement this down the road, only time and effort will tell.

Habits/Skills

Tri-weekly update

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So my friends and I have started this tri-weekly update thing where we get together and talk about what we did in the past 3 weeks and what our future goals would look like. This is kind of like an accountability check and progress check (pretty much a stand-up) in order for us to achieve our goals and keep the progress going. 3 weeks just seemed like a nice midpoint between biweekly and monthly, also to keep you on your toes 🙂 .

This is the 3rd meet-up thus far, and to be honest, probably the worst chunk of time I’ve had compared to the previous two. Have to get back to business.

Reading – average progress, definitely could have been better (1 week slack):
No progress on CTCI lol
Completed Blackthorn Key Book 1
60% progress Blackthorn Key Book 2
Started “A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript” but it seems whatever..

Website/Youtube – having issues with time/resource prioritization
Wrote more blog posts
Decided to put YouTube on the back burner for a bit

Fitness – Plan is to be more consistent (been lacking these past 3 weeks no cap, 50% RPE at BEST)
I think I’m going to make fitness my main source of de-stress/zen time
Current weight: 156 (Goal 160)
Tennis dream more viable, visited the sportings good store in Markham (racquet guys), got some insight/advice from some of the guys working there
Decided to start in spring instead of gearing up right now (very close to buying stuff)

Career – got burned out a bit not gonna lie
Codewars prog: 208 kyu (3 weeks ago was 128)
Bullet journal consistency went down the drain again… SHIT
Started my app again but slacked off a bit in this area as well, probably only put in 3-4 hours… SHIT

Social/Gaming
Still working on minimizing social distractions (left community too lol), can’t help it sometimes tbh
Quitting anime/shows altogether lol, decided it wasn’t going to contribute to the endgame and takes up unnecessary memory
Fixing my YouTube algorithm to reflect this

Endgame build (personal note): Developer / Cook / Athlete / Reader (rejecting all else)

Coding Portfolio

Reflection – putting YouTube on the backburner

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As a follow-up to my previous post, I feel like I could be spending my time better working on my portfolio now (land the job earlier, spend more time learning and applying fundamentals), vs. putting my knowledge into video form. In my previous post, I had wanted to do the following:

Blogging – this is a good form of self reflection and sharing my progress
Technical skills – doing daily problems is maintainable
~~Knowledge gains~~
Portfolio gains – this extends into Knowledge gains; I feel like I should do first and learn next, instead of the other way around
~~Fitness goals~~
Sports goals – this kind of extends fitness goals; I won’t be lifting heavy, but I will be working on bodyweight and skill training
~~YouTube videos~~ – felt like it was taking up too much time, and felt preachy with my current video ideas
~~Social interactions~~ – this was getting to be excessive (although it was one of my earlier goals in the year), cutting down drastically
and Reading – always read

And the ones I’ve crossed out are the ones that I’m putting into lower priority, as I always preach:

Less is more. Do less better.

My main shift will be in the form of Portfolio gains, I will be working on my Liar’s Dice app first and foremost, and will work on trying to deploy it into a shareable form as soon as possible. This will probably be the main thing I will be blogging about in the near future until its completion, and I hope to be able to commit to and and finally complete this (this is probably my 6th attempt or so, from scratch).