October has come with some new things happening.
Feeling like a real SDE 🚀
Been through the first month of internship, can say it's going quite well. Better work-life balance and everything feels much smoother now. Did you know when we get started with something new, we face a bit of difficulties but over time it becomes like second nature. It could be driving a car, riding a bicycle, commuting to school or work or just finishing coding tasks and knowing how to get things done over the day in my case.
The people at Tessact are really chill, it's barely been a month but it feels like working with your bros and carving a product bit-by-bit 🧑🏽💻
I'm trying to follow better practices and optimize how I finish tasks. Now I have a start-to-end go to approach whenever doing any work:
- Open notepad (the world's cleanest and most minimal to do list 😂) and write down clear every task that needs to be done.
- For each subtask in tasks:
- Check if I can complete this subtask without any dependencies.
- If any dependencies, let resolving that dependency be another subtask and add it to tasks.
- Keep doing this until every subtask is noted.
- Sort the list accoding to subtask with least dependency and time. This helps me to get warmed up with the coding without hitting any unavoidable blockers.
For better practices, I try to cross-verify if I'm making any common mistakes and testing some UI with lots of samples to make sure it's working as expected.
It's ah — hhh, working out well so far. Recently, I was thinking what if I'm being too slacky and not giving my best. I will surely finish the 6 months but I won't learn a lot. After spending my first salary (spent it so so lavishly like a prince), I feel nice comfort the money has brought, but I always hope to not let this comfort catch me.
Projects, Exams and Projects
Did you there's a guy called Tanay Pratap who has a teaching camp where you need to build only 4 projects (really good ones though) over a course of 6 months and they will make sure you reach advanced level of web dev; ready to get into SDE roles. 🤔
That's all it takes. A half-year of determination and focus to get into a good place.
The ability to build something is really admirable. Being a computer engineer, I like how it's possible in 2022 to create amazing products with simply a laptop, electricity and internet and the product could be used by thousands generating quite high value as well as income for you. The cherry on the top is most of the money is earned passive.
I've been building projects in domains different than simply web development this year. I learnt web3 and understood how blockchain works. Created a tutorial project for sending Ethereum to an address using Solidity and React. My final year project is an mental health chatbot which the group is trying to build as close as possible to a human. It got me into Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. It's really nice to discover such new domains because I was kinda bored with the monotonicity of web development.
Plans
Everytime I open LinkedIn, either someone got into a MAANG company or someone cracked a really good package in a startup. Someone is graduating from a Tier 1 college or someone is doing revolutionary work. But sometimes, when I open the profiles of few people, I see some of 'em aren't from an extraordinary college. At my age, they were either close to where I am right now or slightly better.
It makes me want to hit my potential right now. I want to research stuff, try out things I never did and just become better than I was yesterday, consistently.
I want to grow at the rate of $2^x$ NOT $x^2$ for these 20s, the lovely 20s, the bitter 20s, the happy-life-is-starting-to-work-but-worried-to-fuck-it-up twenties will never be coming back (x) dd