All Notes

I had a conversation with one of my professors about my resume and other computer science/career stuff, and it showed me that I still have so much to learn. It wasn't like my professor was blowing my mind with information, but it was the way he carried himself and the conversation with confidence that stood out to me a lot. I'd like to think that I am a good public speaker and good at talking to people but hearing him talk about his experience in the industry and his ideas on certain things was really refreshing to hear.

I’m going to the gym again. It’s probably been a month since I keep making excuses, waiting for the “perfect” time to go. But if I keep that mindset for everything I do, then I’ll get nothing done.

I’ve been busy with school and midterms, so I haven’t been able to work on anything. Better days to come soon!

I had a conversation with someone and LeetCode came up. It made me have the urge to lay my thoughts on here. I do not have a positive opinion on LeetCode. The only time I did do it was preparation for an Amazon SWE Internship interview, and it made me dislike coding. I grinded 84 questions in a week to prepare, and it felt so mind-numbing to me. Most of the questions seemed like it all depended on whether or not you knew the “trick” to them rather than solving meaningful problems. Rather than learning core concepts and proving that you are a good developer, it felt like memorizing problems for the sake of it. To be fair, companies need a standardized way to sift through applicants quickly, so I understand it from their perspective. But I wish there was a better way. Whoever finds an alternative and more accurate way to technically interview applicants will be a very rich person. As a side note to my Amazon mention. I passed the interview but got waitlisted. Maybe I’d have a different opinion if I got the internship, but thats about it.

Being a TA this quarter has taught me a lot. Even though I have already taken this class before (Software Engineering), I am going deeper into the concepts in order to make labs for the students. Right now, I'm writing a lab about the MVP design pattern. It's made me realize that I need to take a step back before I start coding to plan out my project's architecture (I should've done this with meap). I've been really busy with school and my TA priorities, so meap hasn't made super fast progress. But the demo feature is going well, I hope to release something within a week.

Today I read a paper about the Spiral Model for software engineering, and it made me realize that all the technical debt I have with meap needs to be cleaned up ASAP if I want to continue to maintain and improve upon it. I will most likely have to dedicate the equivalent of a sprint to eliminate it before I can move on with any more features. I will tend to that after I release the demo feature as well as populating the database with ingredients.

I am starting to learn Go with the goal of learning AWS and apply it to meap. I think learning more about backend engineering and the cloud will be useful for my career. I feel like I restricted myself by sticking with Vercel and not learning more about DevOps and the Cloud even though I have interest in both.

I posted about meap earlier this morning. I hope it reaches out to people and leads to more meaningful connections. I spent way too long worrying about perfecting meap, but if I kept worrying, then I would've never posted about it. This is the start of me posting more frequently and publicly!