In 2023, I’ll meet more people with similar interests and find opportunities to gain real developer experience. I’ll make content sharing what I think and learn. I’ll finish building my projects and truly prove what I am capable of.
- Me, at the start of 2023
2023 Reflection
Meet more people… and find opportunities to gain real developer experience.
A lot changed very quickly after I started my Bachelor’s in Computer Science.
I participated in two largest Hackathons in Florida and secured winning positions! In ShellHacks, my team placed second in Google’s challenge, and in KnightHacks, first place in RBC & Microsoft’s challenge. I was very fortunate to have friends that resonated with my ideas and worked hard to bring them to life. I never meant to, but I learned I’m pretty comfortable taking the role of a leader when it comes to software development.
Right after, I started volunteering as a developer for a research lab to build software for a wearable device. This was the first time I started working with a team long term. I quickly understood the codebase and practically took over the development, but there were some challenges along the way with the lack of processes for communicating ideas. This has verified my understanding and knowledge of asynchronous communication, software development, and project management. It’s been a good experience for improving clear communication of ideas and managing safe, incremental enhancement/migration of codebase.
I also spoke with dozens of recruiters and people within the industry throughout my internship search. There were a lot of scuffed moments, but ultimately, I am much better speaking to strangers than I was before.
Did I learn anything from recruiters and employees? To be honest, not really. I already knew these big corporations give great benefits, and they always say their company has a great culture. The description of their projects are always too vague to walk away with much meaningful knowledge. The only memorable conversations I have is complaining to Google employees that Google Podcast is dying and privacy concerns with proprietary LLMs.
Unexpectedly, the most meaningful conversation was with a senior dev at my marriage brunch. His perspective of how software development changed over time (why Java and C# exists at all, how languages had proprietary compilers) and security and efficiency considerations he has when building software was insightful.
…sharing what I think and learn.
I built this website for this purpose. This is the space that displays all my social links, projects I built, and the thoughts I want to share. I published a post about Rust by the end of the year, so I consider this goal sufficiently achieved.
I’ll finish building my projects…
The developer version of, “I’ll start working out from next year”. While I have built new projects through the hackathons, I still haven’t built a personal project to completion. It takes a lot of time and effort, which has been hard to find amongst my investment to do well in school.
Unexpected achievements
I have way better understanding of Data Structures and Algorithms. Even though I had experience with DSA prior to my school’s DSA course, it taught me how to utilize them better and improve my overall understanding significantly. Learning C and Rust alongside it truly opened my eyes to how programs really work.
Unexpected loss
I lost my primary source of income. I’ve been unemployed ever since and mostly living off my student loans. I tried to search for other gigs and have landed a few, but it hasn’t been great. I’m hoping to find a part time job at school and/or invest more time to offer variety of skills for my freelance work.
2024 Goals
It’s way too late to have a goal statement for the year, but if I pretended today was the anywhere close to the start of the year:
I will land a software engineering internship and find a more stable source of income. I want to continue sharing my ideas and knowledge through my blog posts. I want to complete my projects and keep building to enhance personal data control.