TD - Victor Huynh

3 Month Hiatus? Life update

2022-08-022022-08-02

Took a pretty long hiatus overall… but as a quick update:

It has been quite busy at work — it was one of the first times where I had more than one coop under me (had 3) to coordinate and get work done with.

I’ve also officially become the lead engineer for the application that I’m working on at TD, and I got approved for a raise (as well as inflation raise lol) so I got that going for me.

However, the gains back at home are not optimal – at least when it comes to dev/career aspects. At the same time, volleyball, basketball and MapleStory (lol) have seen some decent gains overall, but I’ve also derailed a bit since I got back and knee pains at some point (still do as of Aug 2, 2022).

Moving forward, I think the main course of action now is to become a better lead overall at work, and perhaps explore technologies at home… although that might be easier said than done. The motivation is just not there, but I do feel like the experience that I’ve gained while working at TD really unlocked a lot of perspectives at home.

That being said, I’ve been struggling with finding a balance between gaming, exercise, sports, social, girlfriend, and work during my home time … I might have to revisit some of my older posts and see what my trains of thought were. Maybe I’m still doing too much… but at the same time I don’t think like I can drop any (except for games? idk tough call). It just might be a misallocation of resources/time… or even overthoughts idk.

I will say that I don’t really enjoy League nearly as much as I used to… the dopamine hits are just not there anymore. It’s likely that I’ll just be an MMORPG slow grinder moving forward

MultiVersus came out recently though, it does seem to have potential as a 2D platform fighter. Currently leaning towards maining Batman and using the dpad instead of the stick. Still fumbling with some controls though

Will need to get back on track though. Still figuring out how I should play out life’s midgame LOL.

Habits/Skills

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

First day at my new job approaches

2021-11-232021-12-12

I’ll be starting my new job on the 29th of November, a pretty exciting time.

I don’t think I’ve been working in office since early Covid, so that was around March 2019 I believe, so this could be an awkward yet refreshing experience for me.

I’ve been slowly phasing out some things that I thought were distracting, and I’m excited to learn and apply my skills, and with a pleasant team that I’m working with, I’m definitely more on the excited end than anything.

Other than my ruined sleep schedule, I think I have a good control of my current athletics and exercise routine. Reading has been relatively consistent, and distractions are at an all-time low. I’m on the fence about completely quitting games (I know, I’ve said it in the past again), but there was Group Ironman that pulled me back in for a bit. Right now, the hype has died down quite a bit, and I’m very far ahead when it comes to the boys, so I might be taking it easy for a bit, at least until I get the hang of things at my new job.

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.