A Week In

January 21st, 2021

Since my last piece about the unknowns of the future, I write from the present to past. The past week was filled with events that I did not expect in the least.

I have spent the majority of the time helping out with the launch of my mom’s new business. My works aren’t any thing fancy in fact mostly deals with helping out with writing up required documents for government approval and basic errands. Most of the work does not involve much thinking and feels a lot closer to chores than work. When I come home after work, I notice the amount of time that has flew by yet also notice the feeling of not having done anything meaningful.

Unbeknownst to me, I think I have developed the need to have programmed/coded to feel productive or at least engage my brain in some form of learning. In fact, I have started the development of a MVP version of online family care service to start a business for myself and mutually benefit my mom’s business. The service isn’t anything fancy and is simply closer to Typeform with document upload feature. As I write this, I’m realizing that I probably could have done literally just that instead of spending tens of hours coding up a backend server and a frontend not to mention the time spent to deploy the service. The residual feelings of hollowness seems to have played a bigger factor rather than actual reasoning.

In spite of a busy week with work, I also participated in the Hack the North for absolutely no reason. I went into the event with the mindset that this will be the last time I will be participating in a hackathon as I’m soon to graduate. The hack we made wasn’t anything interesting but rather I spent the time learning about GraphQL and Google Cloud functionalities with the majority of the time spent swearing about why GitHub API won’t give me the type of results I want. I’m not sure why I made this web app enduring the self-induced pressure and stress about completing a project on time. In fact, we submitted our project a min before the deadline and were all too tired to stay for the judging that I didn’t attend the judging portion. To be honest, I wish I did attend the judging portion of the event and regret it looking back. I used a lame excuse of being tired, although I really was, to avoid the pressure of being judged. It was partially due to the fact that we didn’t get to, what I considered to be a major goal, a shareable link with the ability to analyze the criticality of users contributions. A large portion of the features were features that were mostly added due to disagreements in the team and not particularly ones I was fond of. A teammate was more concerned with making GitHub easier for new users by creating a tool for finding issues to work on. On the other hand, I was interested in the more social aspects of things such as a gamification of users contributing back to the OSS community by creating a comparison of users using the criticality metric inducing some competitive spirit. Talking about a project you didn’t believe in would have been a waste of my time in some manner. In the end, it was a mess as usual as you’d expect from a hackathon including last hour bugs, last minute submission, a member sleeping, deployment not working, etc. Then again, I guess that’s why you attend hackathons. Do I regret it? Nah, I had fun coding something stupid for no reason to get my coding needs out of the way and I learnt new technologies. Overall, it was an enjoyable experience.

That was my weekend. Monday rolls around. I was scheduled for an interview at a small cosmetic branding for a marketing role. I was absolutely not prepared and did no research about the position. The opportunity came up through a family friend as they work in the cosmetic industry and I thought why not at least go to the interview. To disclose my background about marketing, I have none. All I know are things that I picked up while working at a small fintech startup for a bit. I have not ran ad campaigns or anything alike. The CEO of the company was mostly concerned with my potential to learn and quickly adapt. During the interview, I explicitly stated that my goal is to operate my own business in the future and for me to learn as much as possible as a new grad for the said business. I was interested in the direction of the company was hoping to go at and the goals that were being strived toward. We chatted about the issues at hand in the company. I quickly picked up the ideas that he was talking about and had a good two-way conversation. I think the CEO enjoyed the conversation a bit more than I did telling me about the goals he has. I have yet to sign anything on paper so who knows what will happen, but I might do some marketing work in the near future.

To reflect on the past week, I am doing things on paper and people around me says I am doing great. Yet, I still don’t feel at ease. I’m not sure what the reason is. Perhaps, it’s due to missing friends from Vancouver or just my insatiable appetite for undefined “success”. Additionally, my goals of developing a routine has been in the dumps. I have been doing things that I’ve been planning on but there’s absolutely no order of how I do things. In fact, as I write this, I am going to experiment with an actual hour by hour routine for the next one week in the hopes that it stabilizes my lifestyle.

- Tom