journeywithaaron

[journeywithaaron]

Exercising Patience

If there was anything that has really resonated with me the past two years is that the desire for instant gratification is deeply ingrained in me.  It’s not an uncommon desire for someone in my generation, but I feel strongly that just because it is a commonplace should not mean that I should treat it lightly.  Coupling that with personal struggle to consistently put 100% forward, any sort of endeavor for me is often met with feelings of inadequacy and impatience.

I wrote a post two weeks ago after my interview, and because of the hiring freeze I have yet to hear back from the automation team.  Either way though, since that interview I really haven’t done much toward my career, and I probably won’t this week either due in part to the side by side vacations that I’m taking this lovely month of February.  I expected that much and I planned to get the ball rolling again after the Zion trip.  I consciously offset another 30 hours of career development.

Kinda like overtime pay and eating snacks, these small cuts add up over time, and the 160 missed hours now grows to 180, and now to 210 after the vacation shenanigans.  Soon (if not already), that value will grow to the point where I think nothing of depositing into missed hours.  Apathy grows alongside the hours, until someone’s (in this case, my brother) success punches into your life and you are reminded of where you are, what you have, and where you want to be.

I think it strikes particularly hard when your own family members reach a milestone in their life, because on one hand you are genuinely happy for their success.  But on the other hand, because they are your siblings, you know their efforts, you know their thoughts, you know how their success will impact the family dynamic, both direct and extended.  So to see close friends and family hit successful milestones, you’re genuinely happy to see it.  But at the same time, you look at it and say “what that’s it?  That’s all it takes to get your career rolling?  To get the job title that you want, just do an interview that’s just a formality?  Nothing technical?  No on the spot demonstration of something you don’t know?”  It becomes a little bit frustrating and difficult.  

The following statement does come slightly out of bitterness I admit, but it feels awful to know that for every hour in the 250 that you’ve spent, your siblings and friends was able to enjoy games and movies.  I don’t discount their efforts and struggles up until now, but it really is a bit frustrating to see, especially when you’re expecting another 550 hours of this before you can even start your entry level career, but you get to see your friends and family start on their 3+ year experience positions.

I turned 27 the past week.  When I turned 26 I looked at my life and thought that whatever I was doing was not going to fly.  My career was in a poor position, my physical health was being neglected, and none of my passions were actively and consciously being worked on.  I decided to work on that a year ago.  A year later, I do feel like I have made progress, but while i dropped from 138lbs to 120lbs, clocked 250 hours of study, and punched out a few arrangements here and there, my friends and families have reached their career goals, gotten married, etc.  I really do move at a different pace when compared to my peers, and being able to fully accept that peacefully is definitely a flaw for me.  

Sammy did say that this journey is going to be lonely, and that it was going to be really frustrating to watch your friends and family succeed, so I know for sure these thoughts of impatience and frustration are not unique to my situation.  So in light of that, there really is no other positive choice than to do as I told myself 4 months ago to keep Pusheen on.  I decided to take a 2 week break for the vacations, so I’ll keep doing that.  When I resume my activities next week, I’ll find some way again to convert these feelings of impatience and frustration into motivation and quality work.  I still have a lot of things I want to do, even beyond landing my desired career, and they are things that are not things that ought to be mastered in a year, let alone 6 months.  I think that the lack of instant gratification has always caused me to give up at mile 2 of the half marathon, so in this 27th year of blessings, I’m going to do my best to consciously acknowledge and reject that part of me and run the remaining race.  There’s been too many negative posts recently, so I’ll do my best to generate something positive for next time!

[journeywithaaron]

Possibility of Possibilities

Alrighty, this update came a little earlier than I expected myself to chime in on, and that’s because of the interview I had yesterday with the automation team at Panasonic for a Software Engineer role.  I figure that my muddied feelings are valuable enough of a mess to warrant attempting to organize it through a little bit of text…

So I had an interview yesterday with the automation team at Panasonic yesterday and honestly it did not feel all too well.  When I got notification for this interview, I was frankly looking at this relatively lightly, kinda like a “oh, sweet, an opportunity to see where I’m at.”  If you’ve read some of the stuff I’ve written in the past then you know that I am roughly at hour 250/800 of my psuedo-boot camp for myself, so I know I was not nearly where I wanted to be yet.  Nonetheless, I thought I was thinking that it would be a good time to see how my self-study was going, like a checkpoint.

But despite how much I dislike the environment at Panasonic (and my current living situation in general), I found the possibility of possibilities to be like ice cold sparkling water after an intense run.  The possibility that my career beginning could start 8-10 months before I anticipated, that is quite a tempting fruit to be dangling in front of me.  Thoughts like “wouldn’t it be nice if I started this role right after HK/Zion/New Zealand? Perfect timing.”  Or “if I join this team, and it’s relatively decent, I could probably buy a new development home down here and commit to this job for 2-3 years.  While doing that, I could probably use the company education program to grab a 2nd masters in compsci.  Once all is done, I can be 30 years old with 3 years of software engineering experience, and a masters in CS.  Then I could look into a more permanent role.  I will have caught up with Nate and Sammy.”

As the possibilities grew, so did the alternate side though.  If there’s a if, there usually is an else.  So the “what if I get it” usually comes with a “what if I don’t get it.”  To keep myself from negative thinking, I try to encourage myself, and perhaps this is probably something I ought to stop doing.  What came after “what if I don’t get it” was “don’t worry, this is internal, you have a good footing already.”  And “believe in your resume, that they’d recognize that you have good skill.”  And “you didn’t do 250 hours for nothing, trust in your curriculum.”

So, when you walk into an interview after an already rough week of work, and get picked apart by an engineer, it’s not a great feeling at all.  The AniSight project I was passionately working seemed to be met with indifference.  I froze up on the coding challenge, despite it being really easy.  I did well on the behavioral and logic questions, but the engineer would ask “do you know dynamic programming?  do you know JavaScript?  do you know behave?”  Things that I’ve seen before, but have never gotten the chance to dig into.  I think that when I faced all that, it dawned on me that this was an easy interview, but I was not prepared enough.

If anything, it told me what they were looking for, and my answer was basically that I did not have it.  I’ve been adamant about not learning JavaScript and web development, but it was clear that they were indeed looking for a web developer.  And perhaps I was wrong about avoiding it.  I believed that my resume was lacking projects, and that that was what was hurting me the most. But perhaps I was wrong about my point of weakness, maybe I just need to punch through a bunch of coding challenges.

This post has gotten lengthier than I wanted it to be, and I don’t want it to become a DOTM post, so I guess I can try and attempt to draw a few conclusions here.  

As positive as hope usually is, the possibility of possibilities was intoxicating for me.  It makes me look at my detailed plan for myself, and try to chuck that out the window.  Assuming I don’t get the position, which I am fairly confident will be the case, instead of looking at this as a failed opportunity, I should hold fast to my original thought, before I began my spiral of poor thinking.  That is, this was an opportunity to do a milestone check.  I am wrong about avoiding JavaScript, so I need to learn JavaScript.  I don’t know my basic algorithms well, so I need to write up a cheat sheet and consolidate.  I freeze up on coding while talking, so I need to punch through challenges and get used to it.  Regardless of what I think about the process, this is what is necessary for what I believe to be the career I aspire for.  

That is the takeaway from this botched opportunity.  That is the original objective of this interview opportunity.  I succeeded in my objective, and I should be glad that I got valuable insight here at hour 250, and not hour 800.  All I can do now is reflect, adapt, and hope that this time, my decisions are the right ones.  

I won’t know the verdict until a while, but regardless of the decision Panasonic decides on, my possibilities are still endless.  As getting the position was a possibility of possibilities, continuing to work at it for another 550 hours is also possibility of possibilities.  Lots of possibilities out there for me, just gotta keep on workin at it, just gotta keep positive, just gotta keep my eyes on own journey, just gotta get used to it.  Journey’s only 1% finished.

[journeywithaaron]

Update Time

Happy New Year!  It's already been 3 months since my declaration to keep Pusheen on.  Time for a LENGTHY post to evaluate what happened the past 3 months, and how thing's ought to change in the upcoming months in light of that.

So let's see what happened.

Career Building:  After 18 weeks of the 20/5/1.5, a total of 360 hours should have been clocked for career development.  According to the whiteboard (that has received much abuse), 224 hours were clocked, with 136 missing.  So I completed 62.2% of the intended hours toward building my career.  It's difficult to measure actual productive hours during the clocked hours, but I would imagine that all in all, I was probably able to effectively accomplish only 50% of what I intended to do.  I like to take the positive look toward this and say "In the past quarter, I did 224 hours toward bettering my career" instead of the negative "I failed to do 136 hours of what I expected."

Exercise:  I reached my weight goal on time, with an average of 118.6lbs/19.6% body fat for the month of November.  I wasn't able to reach my body fat goal of 18%, though I admit I haven't made any significant changes in my workout regimen/dietary habits.  The month of December was a disaster (as expected due to the holiday shenanigans).  The average went up 1.0lbs/1.0% for December, and hopefully January will pull it back down to November.  I admit the goal became a little hazy after November.  I was not expecting to drop down to 118, and my body fat was not dropping after a while.  At the same time, I was not willing to change up the workout regimen, so when the December holiday foods started to roll in, it's not surprising that my numbers went up.  At least for the month of January, I will continue to maintain the same regimen, and see if numbers drop without the holiday food.

Music:  Since my last update, KAMASOquartet was able to punch out another four pieces!  Granted, I was not responsible for arranging all of them, but there have definitely been opportunities for me to play.  Similarly to exercising, I admit the goal for music got a little hazy (or perhaps forgotten...) over the past 3 months.  Once I selected pieces that I felt were good practice pieces for violin, I only just powered through those pieces each time I clocked in for practice.  For guitar, once I learned a few basic chords, I thought the same, and just powered through them haphazardly each time I clocked in.  Since I knew internally how brain dead these practice regimens were, I ended up skipping quite a bit of practice near the tail end of the 3 months.  For violin, since there was an abundance of things to play for, doing that brain dead practice still happened frequently.  But since there was nothing to practice for for guitar, man I dropped the ball on that one relatively hard.

I'd say thats a relatively good summary of what happened the past 3 months.  As expected, Panasonic has been getting worse and worse (is that even possible?).  A good amount of my acquaintances have left the company, and hopes of career advancement here seems bleak.  Coupled that with all the company politics going on, I admit I ran into a little bit of a wall of impatience and frustration a few weeks ago.  Fortunately for me, I have a great support network that helps keep me focused.  

In light of the feedback and self-reflection, I decided that it was time to reevaluate my 20/5/1.5 schedule to better address my goals and aspirations for 2019.  So, here is the new battle plan.  Introducing the 15/8/1.5 plan!

Summary: (M  /  Tu  /  W  /  Th  /  Fr  /  Sa  /  Su) Career - 15 Hours (2.0 / 2.5 / 2.0 / 2.5 / 2.0 / 3.0 / 1.0) Exercise - 1.5 Hours (0.0 / 0.5 / 0.0 / 0.5 / 0.0 / 0.5 / 0.0) Violin - 1.5 Hours (0.5 / 0.0 / 0.5 / 0.0 / 0.5 / 0.0 / 0.0) Guitar - 1.5 Hours (0.0 / 0.5 / 0.0 / 0.5 / 0.0 / 0.0 / 0.5) Arrangements - 5 Hours (1.0 / 0.0 / 1.0 / 0.0 / 1.0 / 2.0 / 0.0) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total (3.5 / 3.5 / 3.5 / 3.5 / 3.5 / 5.5 / 1.5)

So let's start with the most obvious change.  I dropped career development hours from 20 to 15.  Why?  There are several reasons, but the most strikingly obvious reason for the change is that I was simply not doing 20 hours a week.  I believe the last time that I have actually done 20 hours of career work was week 2, which was 16 weeks ago.  As much as I am capable of doing 20 hours a week, I simply wasn't.  So, follow up question:  If I'm capable of doing it, why am I not?  I entertained several ideas, but the strongest idea for me personally was that I simply had other priorities in life that I preferred over meeting my 20 hour quota.  That, plus burn out was happening.  But as always, looking to the positive, I did clock 224 hours more than I would have doing nothing.  But now, time is less of a factor.  After some lovely chats, right now it's painfully obvious to me that I now have decent knowledge to not look like an idiot in an interview, but my resume simply doesn't have anything to show for my ability.  To some companies, I am already a prime candidate for an entry level SWE position, but I won't get seen because there's nothing to show for my ability.  Therefore, the number one priority for me now, is to show my ability in projects on my resume.  For these projects, it's not so much about time as it is setting a longer deadline and meeting it on my own juggle of time.  So I decided to aim to complete 3 projects in 2 months, giving myself 15 hours a week of time space to meet that deadline.  If I meet this, my resume should be ready to pass out by the end of February--a much more ideal situation than waiting til June.

The next change was my music time increase to 8 hours.  I kinda alluded to it in my earlier paragraph, but music simply is a priority in my life where I constantly regret not doing more while simultaneously hope that I will do more.  Brain dead practicing wasn't exciting, and the way that has gotten me going on that typically was having reasons to play.  In order to have something to play, whether that be for KAMASOquartet, or my own anime covers, I'm going to have to sit down and actually write something.  So, I'm taking the 5 hours I lost from my career development (that I typically never did in the first place) and introducing a time period to write arrangements.

Though I want to stay positive when it comes to my failed schedule, the fact of the matter though is that I was still missing quotas left and right for various reasons.  So, I removed a whopping 2 hours from my schedule by not practicing guitar every day.  Instead now, it is staggered with violin.  I think I don't sacrifice too much by doing this, and it will probably help in the grand scheme of things by giving me more breathing room day to day.

Overall, I hope that the new schedule for myself will emphasize project based goals instead of time commitment based goals.  Time commitment was very important in the beginning phases of my development, but now that I have taught myself a routine, it is very easy to try and fill the time quota without getting anything useful done.  So, to discourage that, here are the actual goals that the schedule aims to meet in the next 2 months:

Career: -  Divide and Conquer Coursera Course (Finish End of January) -  Python Specialization Project:  Making use of the AniList API (Finish End of January) -  Swift Project:  Make an app to consolidate development metrics (Finish Mid February) -  Java Specialization Project:  Making use of social network data (Finish End of February)

Music: -  Arrangements:  Write 1 arrangement per month (Hibike + 17-sai for January, TBD for February) -  Guitar:  Play and record a song with Matthew every Sunday afternoon before Perspectives -  Violin:  Maintain technique to be ready for any required recording/performance

Exercise: -  Hold previous workout regimen, observe if holiday weight disappears

And that's that!  The schedule is now on the table, now it's a matter of sticking to it.  I'm not sure when my next post will be, but if it ends up being the end of February, I hope that I will have good news to report.  Until then!

[journeywithaaron]

Keep On Pusheen

Has it really been a month since the rut?  Goodness, it feels like it was just yesterday.  Nothing special this time in the opener, let’s just get straight into the update.

So the informal chat with the Facebook adviser was basically allowing her to provide feedback on my application.  She provided very specific feedback in a very gentle but informative way, and the feedback was super valuable to me, as it told me very specific things about both my career trajectory as well the checkpoints that I should be looking for should a company like FB be my “ultimate destination.”  Overall, I walked away from that chat with the same thoughts I’ve had prior, but with very concrete milestones to reach along the way.  It’s unfortunate that no opportunity could come from the chat, but as discouraged as I was, I’m glad I was given a gentle reality check alongside a clearer direction.

That was basically like the whole week after the chat, so to see that my last discouraging/depressing post was really 4-5 weeks ago, I’m a little bit shocked at where I’ve bounced myself to.  For the most part, I’ve been relatively faithful in the 20/5/1.5 schedule up until recently.  The past week I’ve only clocked a little over 60% of the required hours for career development (20), and I’ve skimped a little recently too on guitar practice (3.5).  I can see that if I do not make a conscious effort to exercise a little more will power or if I do not reevaluate my metrics, I could be setting myself up for a failure 2 months into the supposed 8.  So again it looks like I’m at another point where I need to make a critical decision.

When I started my 20/5/1.5 schedule, it was a reaction to the success of my data-informed journey of losing 15lbs.  I thought that with the right metrics and direction, I didn’t need to rely on my will power to be able to do what I wanted to do.  When I started my 20/5/1.5 schedule, it was also a rejection of the totally-misunderstood short in the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath as well as my ex-violin teacher’s explanation that “a jack of all trades is a king of none.”  I want to show to myself that both the story and the explanation are incorrect, that you can pursue everything that you want to pursue and still reach the goals that you set for yourself.  Basically the little girl that goes “por que no los dos.”  Lol.

In the past 4-5 weeks I’ve went from the basics of Java if-else statements to binary search trees.  I went from being able to identify what a guitar looks like to be able to swap between 8 common chords and 6 7th chords at 60bpm.  I went from reviewing violin double stop etudes intently to possibly returning to Bach Partitas.  I even had a chance to play badminton this weekend and I was really encouraged by my shocking ability to reach certain shots now (probably cause I don’t have a bowling ball strapped to me anymore).

In some ways, it’s not much progress.  I’m not playing a presentable guitar performance anytime soon.  But in other ways, it’s a lot to me.  I feel like I have a good technical understanding of common coding questions, and with a little review, I could do some decent prepping for that.  So it’s not very much, but it is something, and I’m pretty darn happy about what I could say that I have done in the past month.

Things at Panasonic have been getting worse and worse (Glassdoor rating for HQ went from 3.4 to 2.8 during the time I’ve been here), so it’s a constant battle to exercise patience and trust in the process across all disciplines.  Overall though, for now the 20/5/1.5 schedule has brought an overall wellbeing for myself that I think has allowed me to be content with what I have currently.  I think that as long as I keep Pusheen along, I’ll eventually get to a better place where I can be a little more excited about the future of my career.  Hopefully I can report better news again in the upcoming months!

[journeywithaaron]

Worth Worth Worth

Wow it’s been two months since I last updated.  I assure you, that is mainly due in part to laziness, not because I haven’t done anything.  Lol.  To ramp you (and my future self) up to speed, not much has changed in the past two months...EXCEPT THAT WE STARTED RECORDING KAMASO MUSIC!  Woohoo.  We finished recording Kiki’s in full, and Totoro in audio.  Both recordings have taught me a lot on what I need vs. what I can slip by with, and what I hear vs what others hear.  I think that in terms of music, it is great to get Kamaso Quartet moving.  Website is partly up, and I hope that we can do many many recordings to come.  That, however, is the only great news.  But if you know me, wall of text never come from me because of good news.  Yes, my dear reader, I am here again to dump thoughts that I have difficulty managing, and difficulty sharing.

I guess let’s start with the trigger, and then follow with the cascading effects, and then end with what I see and feel.  The past week, Chris received a full time position at Facebook.  Doesn’t sound like much right?  Let’s continue and outline an aspect of me that I absolutely loathe.  Chris was my referral to my contracting position at Facebook, my first job out of college.  As I went in, he left, and he went to bigger, better things.  Three years passes, and he’s there, and I’m well, here.  In inspiration of Chris, as well as Grace’s push to apply, I asked for and received a referral from Phebe this week, and a recruiter from Facebook reached out to me.  Now, I have an informal chat with the recruiter next Tuesday.  Looking at the position listed, I went to Glassdoor to check out what exactly I’m opting in to.  The bottom line is...

I’m totally screwed.  At least for the position listed, it seems like the interview process is an intensive one, without any of my ability to avoid coding.  If I even get to that point, I don’t think I’ll be able to show any form of code that will be convincing.

So that brings me to my thoughts now, and it’s that I hate it.  I look at my current situation and think, ah, another missed golden opportunity.  “Why didn’t I do what I said I would do, 2 years ago?”  “Am I capable enough to anyway?”  “Will I get another chance?”  I haven’t even talked to the recruiter and I’ve already began to count myself out.

I think with all the success stories that I run into day after day, I’m having a harder time looking at myself in a good light.  People younger than me getting married, people going to new places and seeing new things, people getting better jobs, higher paying jobs, jobs they love, jobs that enable.  It’s hard to view myself in a positive light.  Everything that I’ve used to justify my worth has been slowly taken away from me recently.  Master’s?  Oh yeah, LinkedIn totally just told me, all these jobs I’ve considered?  Yeah 70-80% of applicants are Master’s graduates.  Saving a lot from living at home?  Oh yeah, your friends already have that in their savings, you’re still totally behind, and are still totally behind at the rate you save.  You’re a fast learner?  It’s been a year and a month now, your testing skills have not gotten any better.  Everyone at work is better than you at that.  Something that takes you a week to fix, someone can fix in 30 minutes.  You’re a fun guy?  When people pair up in couple it’s difficult to really find a space in any group to be “fun.”

It feels day after day that my confidence in myself just gets slowly, slowly, taken away, until I’ve finally realized it and a wave of depression just hits.  A “just let me have one thing I can be proud of in myself, I don’t have any right now.” kinda thought.  And with the upcoming “informal chat” with the recruiter, I feel like the nail in the coffin is coming soon.  I have a healthy dose of logic built into me, so I know how hard I’m going to take that.  It’s going to take a while for me to get up and get past that rejection and use it to spur on into the future.  I also know how much that will affect my psyche for a long time.  

I can see it being good for me, but at the same time I have that small window of hope where I just ask quietly to God, “can you let me be proud, just this once?”  I don’t like to go before the Lord in artificial prayer, so when I go before him I just really ask for such a worldly thing, knowing that God’s plans for me isn’t in my worth on Earth.  I know very, very well.  I know, I know, I know.  “My worth is not in skill or name, in win or lose, in pride or shame.”  Yet I come before the Lord, knowing all this, and still asking quietly.  In a way, that feels actually pretty repulsive, and shockingly uncontrollable.  I feel like in both “Yes” and “No,” God has something to teach me through this ordeal.  I’ve thought I’ve always been a pretty good person at controlling and subverting the innate nature in myself, but seeing how uncontrollable my desires, hopes, and emotions run in this patch of life definitely point me toward seeing how far from being a good follower of Christ I am.  I want to say it’s very humbling, but humbling has a positive connotation to it that I don’t think is accurate here.  To me, this whole ordeal is definitely a negatively-feeling humbling process.  I guess this is another one of those “tough love” times for me again.

Anywho, that’s my DOTM on career this time around.  To me it was a little unavoidable to bring in the spiritual part of my personal life that I don’t usually verbalize, but that is the current state for career.  It looks like I’m running into the final nail in the coffin to show me the true state of my being.  Hopefully I can recover, and stick to this 20/5/1.5 schedule I got going for myself.  More on that next time.

[journeywithaaron]

The End to the First Half of 2018

Alrighty, since I got my year-end review/bonus/tiny raise meeting this week, I figure I’d do an evaluation of where I’m at now in 2018 and where I want to be at the end of 2018. Fitness I’m going to include this category in my posts now whenever relevant since they are part of the quad-fecta of areas I’d like to work on.  In February, my peak weight was 140.35lbs with a body fat percentage of 27.0%.  As of today, my weight is at 125.40lbs with a body fat percentage of 22.0%. so I lost roughly 13-15lbs and 4-5% of body fat in 4 months.  That amounts to about 3lbs and 1% body fat per month.  I think that of all the goals that I’ve set for myself for the first half 2018, I was closest to meeting my fitness goal.  I had penned in to reach <125lbs at <20% body fat by the end of Q2 2018, so I was just short about half a pound and 2%.  It’s kinda nice to have shed off a bowling ball off my body, and it’s also pretty darn nice being able to fit back into your favorite suit.  But as we always said at Facebook, the journey is only 1% finished.  For the remainder of 2018, I’m aiming to reach 120lbs while being under 20% body fat.  I believe that to be the “healthy” range for me.  I’m waiting for my weight/body fat to plateau based on my running regiment, and when that happens, I plan to look into some weight fitness to strengthen my body to support the stupidly frail frame that I have.  I haven’t shed away with my favorite drinks and foods, but I have definitely started to eat in moderation.  For the most part, there are nights and afternoons where I have some crazy cravings, but fortunately due to my laziness, sleeping it off hasn’t been a problem.    No one has expressed to me that they’ve noticed, which is actually kinda surprisingly saddening.  I didn’t think of myself as someone who wanted to be validated.  But perhaps that speaks positively of how people view me...or negatively.  Depends I guess on how your life outlook.  Hah.  Overall, for the first half of 2018, I think I am most proud of myself for this category of work, and based off my habits so far, I’m relatively confident that I will meet my 2018 goal in this category. Music WE MADE IT!  The first ever KAMASOquartet live wedding gig has been performed.  There were a lot of unexpectedly difficult hurdles and obstacles, but I guess the wedding director appreciating our work means that we did something right, at least.  Haha.  Capping out that weekend was a day trip to San Jose to watch Joe Hisaishi--the man who pulled me from my rut in 2012--live.  I have to admit, that weekend was a very proud moment of this year.  For me at least, arranging is no easy feat.  I took 30 man hours to do Kiki’s, 20 for Totoro, 20 for Ponyo, and 10 for Country Road for a grand total of 80 hours to punch out 4 pieces.  If that was a full time job, that’s 4 songs in 2 weeks.  Since it was a after-work sorta deal, that ended up being roughly 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 8 weeks.  To me, that was a huge investment of time, especially on top of my fitness goals and desire to advance my career.  To get told that I don’t do anything and get jabbed lightly that I don’t hang out with them, I have to admit that I get slightly heated and annoyed.  I didn’t think myself to be someone who cared deeply about how I was viewed by my community, but this weekend of going back to what I’ve prided myself in in the past using sheets that came from my sweat and ears that I got to verify live in San Jose was a cathartic moment for myself where I got to say “in your face” to those who decided that my life was something that they wanted to be spectators of.  But people aside, the culmination of all my arrangement and practicing ended in a weekend was a magical moment in my heart, and I think this weekend will convince me that I treat my music hobby seriously for many weeks to come.  That said, the mid-year goal was indeed to write the arrangements for this wedding.  Originally, I was thinking of going gung-ho on music only until the gig, but the weekend has shown me a little, so I’ve decided to aim to finish my Ghibli Book by the end of 2018.  Originally I was fretting over copyrights and whatnot, but if I do this as a private project and not as something to sell and profit off, I think it will be ok.  I think it’s a little ambitious, because that amounts to roughly 2 songs per month, which if I can do one in 20 hours, would be 2 hours a per weekday, or 5 hours per weekend day.  I also hope to (finally) set up a website for this stuff.  Granted I can’t publish anything really unless it’s my original compositions, but I guess having that site up and resources readily available to plug myself into weddings would be a nice source of finding opportunities to exercise this hobby.  Who knows, maybe all this will eventually show me that I can do away with engineering for the rest of my life.  Hah... Career And the worst for last.  Ah, what a bubbly failure this one ended up being.  Exactly one week ago, I boarded Cathay Pacific with two full sized luggages, one backpack, and one carry on suitcase after completing my Master’s in HK.  On this day exactly, I was sitting in my ex-managers office, interviewing for the position I am in.  In that interview, he expressed to me that he worries that this job would be too boring for me, that it wouldn’t be challenging enough.  I responded that the company deals with something that I am interested in, and if I found that this position was too boring, I would love to switch over to a role where I can be a bigger contributor.  When I said that, I meant that I wanted to end up in software development.  He replied that our department wants focals to work at least a year in their position before switching over.  When I accepted this position, in the back of my mind, I was already thinking about ways to switch over.  One year has passed since then, and a lot of the initial conditions have been changed, but one year later, I can confidently say I am not much closer to software engineering than I was the day I accepted the position.  I can’t walk into any interview room confident in my ability to write code or to evaluate code.  My resume doesn’t reflect the ability to code, and as time keeps going on, my resume will slowly shoehorn me into a deep career of test engineering.  It’s a field that can pay well, but it is definitely the field that tends to get bullied a lot.  Again, after the one-year, and half-year commitments, I expressed a desire but didn’t jump in deep enough to get any closer to my desire. But you know, fall 6 times, get up 6 times.  As long as I continue to respond to my guilt and disappointment with reinvigorated passion, I think in time, whether 6 months or 5 years, I’ll one day find the strength and determination to make a strong jump backwards into the career line that’s next to me.  So for the remainder of 2018, I hope to be able to put myself in a position to apply to entry level software engineering roles by fall.  That means, for this summer, I hope to finish two specializations (Java and Algorithms) on Coursera, finish out 30 days of code on HackerRank, create a health app, write more scripts at work, and develop a mini mobile game.  Quite a loaded summer, but the hope is that by the start of 2019, when someone asks “can you code?” I can confidently reply with “yes I can.”  Hopefully this past half-year is the last time I have to fall over. Final Half-Year Review Remarks Whew I’m back to my wall of text tendencies.  When I graduated from UCI in 2015, I looked back at the 5 years of college that I had and thought “man that is the fastest I will ever grow, and now growing will slow down.”  And I was wrong, because in some aspects, I felt like I’ve shrunk, actually.  I think that since graduation, my pride and bitterness have spiraled into something that is dangerously hard to control.  The part of me that declares goals and doesn’t take action is still present, and a new desire to be viewed by my community in a certain way has manifested itself out of nowhere.  While I highly value peace and balance, I think a lot of the negative aspects of who I am now crept up from tilting too far into the peace side of things, which became more like lethargy than peace.  I guess, then, the abrasive community that I find myself in now was right in calling me out.  I believe that in the past half-year, I did accomplish many things that I have not accomplished before--tanking my weight down a bowling ball and pumping 4 arrangements that I actually don’t want to burn.  But for me to match what I declare to dream to be requires even more work than what I think to be my personal limit.  The upcoming half-year, I hope to find out whether or not this limit is the actual limit, or just a mental block that I put on myself to allow myself to continue to dwell in those negative aspects of my personality.  Of course, the hope is that I can break the limit and combat my negative tendencies, but I do have a tendency to fail quite spectacularly.  But that’s ok, as we also said back at Facebook.  Fail fast, fail harder.  Hopefully the next report in will show signs of more action.  Not a bad first half of the year, but let’s use both the negatives and positives to motivate ourselves into finishing the year strong!

[journeywithaaron]

Ponyo’s Done!

Ok I give up on titling posts after the day past the first declaration post because I don’t post enough to keep track.  So I guess a summary for a title would be a better idea...Just gonna jump right into it this time. Music: I FINISHED PONYO.  Hallelujah.  I’ve probably heard “Ponyo ponyo ponyo sakana no ko” over 200 times now and thankfully I haven’t ripped my ears out.  But by God’s grace I guess I’ve made it through...I’d say roughly 30 hours of work?  For a 2 minute 45 second score lol.  I think even though Melodyphony didn’t have the orchestral score for Ponyo, Ponyo wasn’t the hardest title I tackled up to date.  At first I thought it would be terribly difficult being unique for each verse and chorus, but after laying out the melody and the first half of Ponyo, I realized that there wasn’t a need to try and be fancy with it.  I felt that all three choruses could have the same notes as long as the verses had different variations.  Actually, I felt like it was necessary for the choruses to have the same style/notes, otherwise I felt like the catchy-ness of the chorus sorta disappeared.  I did change Violin II’s part for the last chorus though to match the Budokan performance though--I thought that it was a good way to segue (not segway...) into the ending remark.  Also though, I went through my other arrangements by actually playing them on the violin and I thought, “oh I probably need to practice this part...and that part...and that part...”  And then it hit me, why am I writing things to be so difficult?  Who am I even writing for?  What is it even for?  And I thought oh right, it’s for a reception.  It’s not for us to steal attention, but to provide an environment for people to chat in.  Then my priority should ought be to sound solid, and not to have to play difficult chromatic scales in sixteenth notes.  So I avoided being fancy in Ponyo as much as possible.  I also went back on all my scores and simplified them.  Actually, I think trying to be as simply as possible ended up being a good constraint for Ponyo.  But yeah, I finished the notes, and tomorrow I’ll finish it up by making the score clean and organized.  After that I’ll probably try and tackle perhaps Country Road (because I feel compelled to do it).  It’s a little optimistic of me but, I hope to be able to get through two more this week on my own.  Titles being Country Road and Merry Go Round of Life.  If Beethoven possesses me this week then maybe I can add in Spirited Away but uh, that’s like hoping to win the lotto I guess.

[journeywithaaron]

Day 17

Welp.  Looks like daily updates are a no bueno.  I’ll try my best to do a weekly from now on.  I’ve been doing a little more organizing recently since Q2 2018 is coming to an end, and so I’ve set new goals for the end of the year while evaluating how I did for the first half of 2018.  Long story short, finances seemed to have caught up, and my fitness seems to be on track to hitting my “healthy” goal.  So that’s great.  To be fair, my music and career goals didn’t start until almost halfway through the first half of the year, but it’s not fair to them to not evaluate them as well.  That long story short, neither went too hot for Q2.  I will try my best to redeem them in this month of May so that I could get myself rolling into the latter half of 2018. Music: Haa...ok.  This one took a plunge the past two weeks.  The main reason for the plunge was the sudden influx of work shenanigans that made me evaluate career things instead of properly facing Ponyo.  I think because I lack the score for Ponyo, it’s been really irritating because it’s been hard to hear the notes that I want to adapt.  I almost want to move on to the next piece, but no unfaithfulness shall be allowed here.  But the deadlines are rapidly approaching, and I ought to put more emphasis on this really.  Since this is the last month where there’s an actual event to prepare for, I’ll do my best to also practice daily to solidify and fine tune my playing.  Granted, it’s been hard because it also feels at times in this month that I need to “hurry and be ready for software positions because there might be an opportunity real soon.”  So if I’ve been doing 40/60 for music/career, I ought to give music a little more given the deadlines, like 80/20.  But since I haven’t been willing to give my career 20, I guess I’ll just have to be 80/80 this month.  Guess this is kinda like a final stretch before I change up my pace. Career: Ooh this one’s a bit more exciting.  Kinda.  I’ve been trying to power through my Coursera classes and honestly they have been a little dry.  It’s hard to sit in front of a computer screen and watch janky recordings of professors talk for a long period of time so, I’ve fallen behind on both my Algorithms and Java courses ahaha.  I just re-picked up the HackerRank 30 days of code challenge and that was kinda fun.  To make up for my slowed pace as outlined above, I hope to finish the 30 days of code by the end of this month.  I think I can be able to stay on track with the Java course (and finish it at the end of this month), but the Algorithms course, due to it’s difficulty, I might have to delay it and finish it later which kinda sucks, but might be necessary.  Next week Panasonic engineers will have the opportunity to attend a whole day AWS training course, so I’ll be attending that.  To put it in a poor way, I think at this point I am willing to sacrifice the quality of my current work to focus on trying to get skills for software engineering.  That is, if it takes a while to write a script, then I’ll still do it even if it means making my deadlines a little more tighter.  So yeah, the goal for the remaining portion of this quarter (end of May) is to finish up the 30 days of code and the Java course.  If magic happens, maybe even the Algorithms course, but I’m not banking on my discipline for that...

[journeywithaaron]

Day 7

Rejoice!  My new commitment has hit its one week anniversary.  As much as I’d like to celebrate by never doing work after work again, we all know where that leads me.  So without further ado...

Music: I wanted to start Ponyo this weekend, but because of Ikea with the family and church anniversary banquet and falling slightly behind on the coding work, I wasn’t able to get to Ponyo until today.  Ponyo is going to be slightly more difficult compared to the other Ghibli songs I’ve done so far, mainly because Hisaishi’s Melodyphony orchestra score doesn’t have Ponyo.  No matter, I will just have to listen to Ponyo 500+ times to catch the notes played in the Budokan performance.  Fortunately for me, Ponyo is the shortest and simplest of the three Ghibli pieces (I think), so I won’t hate this song just yet, hopefully.  I think going through Ponyo today let me see some musical similarities in note selection and rhythm between Ponyo and Totoro.  I also think that by going through the third of three Hisaishi Ghibli scores, I realized that all the countermelodies are pretty cute and childish and the sum of all the parts create a pretty pleasing and simple (but not really) piece.  Hopefully I will keep note of this the next time I have to make an arrangement without as much uh, supporting material.  Lol.  I finished allocating the melodic line to the instruments that I wanted today for Ponyo.  Tomorrow hopefully I will begin adding in the supporting elements, and hopefully finish by the end of this week.

Career: Whew.  Lots of work done here this weekend, kinda.  I made the plunge and decided to fork over another 50/month to do the Algorithms Specialization, mainly because the accountability that financial loss brings is just too strong of an accountabila-buddy to pass up on.  Also because I had a conversation with my brother-in-law this weekend and sure enough the things I learn in that class seem to be directly useful for the interviewing process for Software Engineers.  For the Algorithms course, I got a sparkling 2/5 on the end of the week quiz initially...lol.  But hey, most of it was crazy math derivations (which I did not miss one bit) with figuring out Big O notation stuff with varying merge sort parameters...so it’s not THAT bad...lol.  Hopefully I can aim to get the high level knowledge and use that to apply that in my programming and interview answers.  I’m enjoying myself though--education a lot more fun when you have a goal to work toward, and don’t stress over grades and whatnot.  I don’t like looking up and realizing that it’s 10:00pm and it’s time to get ready to sleep since I have another grueling 8 hours of work the next day though (which hasn’t exactly been treating me the very best).  What’s a journey without a challenge, I guess?  Haha. After a week of trying things out and getting resources and whatnot, I think I’ve found a decent extra workload that balances out my hobbies, work, career, and social life as of now.  Not exactly sure if I can do this long term without burning out but, well see.  

[journeywithaaron]

Day 4

A bit more productive than yesterday:

Music: Finished “A Thousand Years” today.  Threw the cleaned up sheets into the folder.  That gives me room to start Ponyo this weekend.  If I’m diligent, I hope to finish by Wednesday next week, but knowing my energy levels and my priorities in exercising and career development, I think Wednesday would be a little optimistic. I had a bit of free time to do some more research on copyrights and what’s needed for the proper use/publication of sheet music.  It’s a mess, but if you have the goal of putting up the sheets on your own website and sell them, the requirement is that for each sheet you put up, you need to contact the copyright owner (usually a publication company) and request the “permission to arrange.”  The copyright owner has the ability flat out say no, and if you proceed, it’s illegal.  They can just simply say yes, and you would provided the proper paperwork that you will have to reference at the bottom of your sheet music.  They could also say yes, but only if you pay us 50 bucks.  Or 500 bucks.  Or 5000 bucks.  Orrrrr 50000 bucks.  Depending on the owner, it is up to their discretion and you are at the mercy of it.  I guess that’s why sheet music always ends up being so expensive.  The ability to perform arrangements though is a little different, and falls under performance under the expectation that is not recorded/published in any sort of way.  For performance, all you need is a “mechanical license.”  Normally, venues already have this license covered, and so the performers can perform as they please.  If they don’t then the musicians are supposed to get that license themselves.  The laws are a bit grounded in the past--it looks like performance comes with the expectation that it’s not going to be recorded, as recording back in the day was an activity in itself.  Nowadays people just bust out a cell phone and boom, uploaded to YouTube.  All in all though, I think there’s a huge difference between publication and performance.  And with that new information, I need to think again as to how to format my music website.  Hah...

Career: I had better effort today.  Got through the introduction of Roughgarden’s Divide and Conquer Algorithms course.  Seems like there is indeed a lot to learn, and that this is definitely a long haul commitment.  It was interesting to hear that the way that we’ve been taught how to do multiplication was an algorithm, and that there’s actually countless other potential algorithms out there to do multiplication.  Granted, for us, perhaps the way that we’ve been taught is the most efficient and fast to us, but to a computer, having smaller and fewer computations means a faster run time, and less resources used.  So seeing how Karatsuba multiplication approached multiplication was pretty interesting, and I can definitely see how there are smaller and fewer computation steps using that algorithm.  Pretty awesome to see.  I got the math no problem, but man every time programming is brought up, my confidence just shoots straight down.  He mentioned that we should already know what a recursive algorithm is, and I was like, uhoh.  I got a general high level understanding of it now though, after Googling.  But I guess I will have to do that frequently when it comes to programming.  Thankfully I guess I am also taking that Java programming course to help on that front.  I didn’t get to that course today though.  Hopefully I can ramp up my consistency and time investment in these courses in time.

[journeywithaaron]

Day 3

Music:  Been inadvertently focused on this one recently because transposing music to fit a cello is a lot less effort than arranging based on Hisaishi’s scores.  I finished “A Thousand Years” last night.  Took about 2-3 hours from start to finish.  I have yet to look through it and give bow marks yet so that we don’t look dumb, and I haven’t finished formatting the score so that it doesn’t look like a mess.  But all that should be done tonight, and I can probably start Ponyo this weekend.  I did a little brainstorming at work yesterday too with how I want to format the website portfolio thing for my music.  The front page will probably be an image of scattered sheets with some punch of color somewhere (natural wood or succulents or something), and each post below will normally (hopefully) be posts about a new sheet being uploaded.  Details on the arrangement would follow after.  I am still debating how I ought to host my content though.  Is posting them up for download illegal?  Do I want it to be easily grabbed?  Do I want to charge money for it?  If so, how do I attain copyright permissions?  Do I not post it at all, and only the performance of it?  These are all questions I think I am trying to find where I stand on it, and I think as the website fleshes out and as I do more arrangements, the answer will come to me in time. Career:  Ooh this is going to be a lonnng road.  I think the boost in music activity is due in part to how difficult career pursuit can be without the academic environment.  It’s only Day 3 and I struggle to log in coursera to take a look at the courses that I’ve enrolled in.  I’m aiming to do two specializations, and each of them cost 50/month to enroll in.  I can audit one of them, and make it only 50/month, but to be honest that 100/month thought I think is pretty good at guilting me into thinking “hey get online and do it.”  I have a 7-day no payment time frame, so I have until next week, but I really ought to go through week 1 and 2 of both courses to verify that these courses are the right material.  If they are, then I think I’d have a clear end point for the next 3-4 months.  I think I’ve been avoiding this daily activity and using the music activities to keep myself from feeling guilty for not being productive.  I even rearranged my furniture in my room to try and create a more isolated work environment.  I’ve basically done my “clean the kitchen and room first before studying for a final” dance, so hopefully I can really punch the courses home today and this weekend. My Cracking the Coding Interview book arrived!  It’s a huge textbook lol.  I’ve read the introductory pages in the book, and I was really surprised that the book addressed my role at Panasonic.  Like there was a small section with “software design engineers in test aiming to be software developers.”  I was like whoa, a message for me.  Then I read it and it was relatively sad.  The author was basically saying that as close as SDETs are to SWE, the jump between roles is hard if you just follow the motions at work.  So I guess it was sad, but also a little verifying in that I have to take my studies in my own hands.  I guess I got the same impression as well from my manager when I had a chat with him about it.  The book had a 1-ish year roadmap to landing the “first” position for CS studiers.  It looked relatively reasonable, but it assumes that courses were taken already before the start, so I guess I will be taking courses in parallel.  Since my goal is to transition careers solidly by May 2019, I think that I can follow this road map.  One of the things the book kept kinda saying to me was projects projects projects.  I think it’s pretty clear that my resume will be bare of coding experience, so I need to do projects that excite me.  Projects are a good way to execute what I study, as well as build resume lines.  In some way, it takes out multiple stones with one activity, and it’s one of the activities that the book encourages us to do from the get go.  So I think after I get a good handle on Java, I’m going to try and make a health app that consolidates the health data that has been scattered into one GUI.  I hope to add features to it over time, like a “stretch routine” workout.  I think that developing this app would give me a good source of relevant practice...although it’ll be using Swift and not Java.  But that’s ok, it will be good to dabble in other languages too.

[journeywithaaron]

Journey to the North

So I’m opening this Tumblr up so that I can keep track of my own progress, and for me to keep myself accountable to the commitment that I have made to my future and my career.  It will also hopefully be a place to allow for me to digest what I’m putting into my head.  Hopefully by pouring out how I feel about the things I will try to approach with all my heart, I will be able to better understand where I want to take my career and hobbies to in the near future.  

I think in the past 5-7 years, I’ve always been a pre-Shirase Kimari with the whole grand ambitions but never taking any steps toward making the aspirations a reality out of the fear of failing/mediocrity.  I don’t have a Shirase to inspire me to take the first steps, but I do have a job that eats at my soul every day that I’d like to transition out of, so perhaps the fear of falling into a career that I won’t enjoy the rest of my life will be enough for me to overcome my fear of failing and relapsing back into laziness and grand speeches that amount to nothing.  I’ll see how far I can go with this by taking my own action, but hopefully I can put enough time and diligence in this for me to make my way back up to NorCal in a career that I can be proud of in time so that I don’t fall too far behind my peers.  So without further ado...the summaries up til today!

Music:  I finished Best Day of My Life today.  Honestly I can’t even consider that to be a productive work--I simply transcribed the alto clef in Matt’s transcription to bass clef.  I threw in rehearsal marks, dynamics, and bowings just so that we’d all be on the same page on performance, but really no work was done there.  Tomorrow I will hope to begin transcribing “A Thousand Years.”  As our reception gig is coming up in a little more than 6 weeks, I’m hoping that my contributions would allow for us to not need to repeat any songs--that would mean that we ought to aim for about 30-35 titles.  I contributed 4 folders to the Google Drive so, we are a way away.  As for setting up a legitimate website to always leave the door open, I’m thinking about making the weekends a little more productive and drop in at a coffee shop for about 2 hours to begin working on the website for AmasoMusic.  The goal for this week at the least is to finish “A Thousand Years” and to begin on website design for AmasoMusic.

Career:  I enrolled in two specializations so far:  Algorithms Specialization, and Object Oriented Java Programming:  Data Structures and Beyond.  I chose Java mainly because that’s the language that I have the most experience with, and I went with the Algorithms Specialization as Sammy recommended it to be a course that he found useful.  I’m waiting on my “Cracking the Coding Interview” book to come in the mail so that I could use it as resource--but ultimately I didn’t really do much except try and set before me a pathway to follow for the time being.  Hopefully I can keep up with the two courses and their schedules.