Learning - Victor Huynh

I’m back…

2022-04-032022-04-03

Minor setback…

Lost Ark came out and it turns out, it was pretty fun to play and research the game through the early to endgame.

This put me back on my blogging rate and personal development work… but it was worth it to be honest. New game launches are always the best part of gaming.

Now since I’ve reached the endgame to the most part… we’re getting back on track.

I want to make up for lost time (no pun intended) by re-evaluating what I want to do, and not much has changed except that React will be swapped to Angular, as it’s more relevant for my work at TD for now.

According to my webtime tracker app, most of my distractions (and time spent) is on YouTube… with a staggering 25% of my total web browsing time, with the next highest with google at 6%. I do attribute it to researching lost ark and watching programming videos though… but definitely something to be more cognizant about.

As usual, I make monthly resolutions for this month, and the focuses of choice are:

Become more active at the gym (4x a week, sport days count as a day)
Cardio more (skip rope, runs)
Minimize distractions and gaming time (still want to do my dailies tbh, but it’s only an hour a day if efficient) – turns out reddit doesn’t take as much time as I initially thought, but sub optimal either way because of all of the breaks in focus; definitely a habit that I want to break
Learn Angular (NgRx was definitely difficult to grasp, it took way longer than I expected to get things working at work)

There were other things I kept in mind, but generally I find that the smaller and more focused the goals, the easier it is to commit to (as well as more effective).

Learning

Current learning goals and MERN update

2021-12-122021-12-12

As of now, this is the end of my second week at TD, and I had a huge realization that I still had a lot of learning to go. Not only did I realize that the standard 7.5 work hours a day was not enough (mostly due to meetings), I don’t think it is practical to expect to get up to speed without putting in extra hours. However, it’s actually an exciting position to be in personally, because I do enjoy challenges and it’s slightly more lenient as well because of the holiday season coming up (and code freeze lol).

The current pivot is to spend more time actually getting myself up to speed with the new environments and technologies that the team is using, unfortunately taking some time away from my MERN stack endeavors. Hopefully, due to the notes that I took, it shouldn’t be that hard to context switch once I feel more comfortable at my current job. As of now, my current tickets include implementing a new environment (GitHub SaaS) into the onboarding application that I will be primarily focusing on. Once that’s taken care of, I was also assigned with a code cleanup, thus giving me an incentive to go through most of the source code and optimize/clean up certain things. This adds the requirement of getting used to working in AngularJS, NodeJS, and potentially NGRX.

All in all, exciting, interesting, and somewhat stressful time getting dropped into a slew of new technologies to work with, but at the same time I feel honoured because it seems like a trust exercise because I never had those technologies in my resume to begin with. Currently doing my best and minimizing other distractions in order to hit the floor running, and trusting the process.

Learning

End of my first week at TD!

2021-12-062021-12-06

My first week at TD was very inspiring and interesting to me, especially because I’ve previously worked at another competing bank. The onboarding process (although I’m not sure if you could even call it onboarding), felt smoother and more streamlined than what I’m used to, I think I got all of my software installed by the end of the 2nd day, and most of my VM set up by the 3rd and 4th. This is contrasted with my 2 weeks of scrambling and only getting the software up and running by the second week. I suppose it had to do with the whole cloud/devops theme, but it definitely feels more like a well-oiled machine than the previous adhoc (where everyone does a bit of everything and knows a bit of everything) that I was accustomed to in the past years.

In a sense, you could say that it felt a bit silo-ish, where because it seems more well defined, certain groups seemed to interact with their groups more than others. At the moment, hard to tell, but it was one of the things that were mentioned during one of the weekly group meetings. Siloing seemed to be a growing issue (to them, anyway), the more that the processes were streamlined, and it sort of makes sense in a way. When you don’t have to interact with as many people to deploy something and clear documentation is provided (with debugging notes), it does make sense that there is less of a need to exchange e-mails when everything is easily accessible and usable. I think that’s one of the shadows of DevOps in a way (at least from a noob perspective, at least that’s what it seems to me), but I do understand that it’s the cost of productivity. It makes sense that as pipelines get more and more refined, productivity goes up, requirements for long e-mail chains go down, and ultimately the feeling of siloing emerges at some point.

So far, I’m very pleased with my position so far the bank, it really does feel like a fresh of breath air and what my university self would’ve imagined being an engineer would be like. I have touched upon several technologies already that I’ve never previously worked with, as well as got some shadowing experience by watching over their work process, and learned a lot in the process. The only downside I can see so far is the sheer amount of meetings that I’ve been a part of, it’s quite daunting especially for the first week. I think in the 5 business days that I’ve been in, I’ve been in at least 20 hours of meetings. That’s greater than half of the expected work hour week when I don’t even fully understand the projects that I will be a part of! I feel like it’s a point worth noting because some of the seniors have even more meetings to be a part of, and I’m not entirely sure how they can get their work done without bleeding into pre/post work hours.

All in all, excited to be here, and it is definitely a pleasure and welcoming work environment to be a part of.

Habits/Skills

I got hired!

2021-11-112021-12-12

So, after almost 3 months of interviewing, I finally got hired by TD via reference + 2 interviews! Very happy and relieved that this phase is over.

To be honest, even though it was sort of a rash decision to leave my job, I feel like these past 3 months have really given me a lot of insight on how I should lead my life. I’ve done a lot of thinking, especially with what is important to me, and I’ve really come to embrace the philosophy that less is more. I had previously thought that I was doing as little quantifiable things as possible already, but during these few months I’ve realized that it wasn’t necessarily true.

Sure, I was playing “2 games” and “2 sports” while focusing on my health, diet, and reading habits. But in reality, even though they’re objectively just under 10 things, the amount of time that was spread out was significant and skewed. It’s not difficult to believe that people tend to spend time on things that are more enjoyable (i.e. games/sports, as opposed to career or training), and I realized that it was the case for myself as well. The ratios were not as clean and consistent as I’d liked, and I had to make a change for the better if I wanted to achieve greater things.

I think ultimately, 1 sport to truly hone in on is ideal, you can see what golf and baseball did to Michael Jordan for example. Even though he was one of the greatest basketball players of all time, even with his athletic ability, drive and learning skills, there was no chance that he could amount to the people who were already great at that sport — not to mention that his main sport, basketball, had suffered a bit because his body was forced to adapt to these different circumstances.

I feel like people should be the same way and truly mean it. Perhaps it’s a little preachy or hypocritical even, but in this point and time, I don’t really see the point in exploring new hobbies when there are already hobbies that you highly regard and are a part of your identity. Could I live my life without knowing the pleasures of skiing and scuba diving? Probably. Would it be a life changing experience? Possible. But would it become a part of my identity in the long run? Unlikely.

Just some things that I was thinking about that I wanted to express in writing.

Interviewing

Change of Direction?

2021-10-312021-12-12

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.

Coding Portfolio

Liar’s Dice Update 1

2021-10-222021-10-22

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

2021-10-172021-12-12

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

2021-10-022021-10-02

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).

Coding Portfolio

Roadblock

2021-09-272021-09-27

Probably one of the things that I’ve been experiencing and struggling with lately, because I really am not sure what the best way to approach things are. This is probably just a self-reflection step, but I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not I should prioritize leveling up my technical, hard skills, or try to land more interviews first, and worry about the technical grind later. In theory, I did save up enough savings to survive and pay rent for half a year, but I’m not sure if I’m willing to deplete that resource during this phase of my life.

Perhaps the best approach would be to do both, but at the same time I’m struggling to prioritize between

Blogging (this is my form of journalling in a sense)
Technical skills (i.e. leetcode, codewars)
Knowledge gains (i.e. reading technical blogs/articles/books)
Portfolio gains (i.e. getting something to show/talk about on my resume)
Fitness goals (i.e. getting to the weight that I want, working on my strength/agility)
Sports goals (i.e. working on my skill, footwork in basketball/volleyball)
YouTube videos (this was especially tough for me because it feels like a lot of work for the least gains)
Social interactions (I’ve largely decided to cut down, because it was a big source of time sink)
and Reading (sometimes I’ve been caught up in doing other stuff that I felt like it was okay to skip reading days)

It’s been a lot to juggle, and I think I need to take a step back and think about what my time allocation and approach should be. It’s definitely been tough, even when I’m not working full-time, especially with a steady stream of rejections coming into my mailbox (lol). It seems like I don’t have enough time on my hands, even though I’ve been trying to maximize my time and efficiency. Interesting predicament.

Learning

Next Steps for October

2021-09-262021-09-26

Whenever I think about creating YouTube comment, it is difficult to think about specific things to be shared. For me, I thought it would be enough getting practice in, and sharing thoughts or thought process, but it seems to be a lot of repetition if I did so. However, I do think that once I start projects, there is probably more room for content and progression tracking. That might be the vibe down the road, but right now I definitely have been putting it off more than I liked. I was struggling with getting enough content to fit under a certain video length, mostly because I dont like the idea of videos that are too long.

Moving forward, for the month of October, I am going to be working on my problem solving skills and language familiarity (JavaScript) as my central focus. I feel like it was a result of unfamiliarity and lack of problem solving preparation that I didn’t land the jobs that I interviewed for during September. On a side note, I think that my time effectiveness is higher overall, but I still find myself getting sidetracked easily, this will be a work in progress as well. I do think that too much social interaction is detrimental for the gains, but there is a certain balance that would promote good growth.