Self-reflection on Christmas Night

“2018, That’s a Wrap!”

Today pretty much wraps up my whole year’s study. One more day and I will be leaving for Japan with friends. So instead of going out, I wanted to write something to reflect on my performance this year — either the good or the wrong.

A few Hackathons & Many great friends

I joined a few local Hackathons & Techathons(whatever the name is), met some great friends and learned a lot. This let me realize how much I need to learn and how amazing the Tech can be. Before all these I was always the doubtful(or ignorant) one — Like, how good can the prototype be if you just have few days with completely unfamiliar teammates? But that couldn’t be more wrong.

1. This is where developers can be innovative.
2. You can always learn something. Most of the time people are expected to hack up some prototype for the demo and it’s usually about applications, tools, services or more where you need to learn new tech stack quickly to get it working. This can really build the skills.
3. About teamwork. It takes time to know a person so learning to work with unfamiliar people professionally is a great characteristic for developers.
4. Engagement & Recruitment & Branding & Community.

I started blogging…Again

I started blogging…again. First I started a blog on GitHub pages simply under the link https://isdanni.github.io/. It’s pretty simple Markdown language with Hexo framework. Three commands(hexo clean, hexo g and hexo d) can publish a post. Then I went to try the Jekyll, a static web generator with the minimalist theme. But I sadly checked some poorly made blogs so decided went back to Hexo. That’s when I discovered WordPress, which I heared a lot of bloggers are using it to “truly” customize their homepage but I never understand what the fuzz is about. I even shamelessly relied on the convenience of WOrdPress.com for a while, only writing some random thoughts with zero effort.

Around BlackFriday, one of my friends told me GoDaddy was going to have a domain discount and they have one not registered yet that’s perfect for me. I told him I would check it but actually never did…till two weeks later and I suddenly decided to spend some money(How magic). I went online and magically found this HUX blog framework customzed by Facebook Engineer Xuan Huang. It has every feature I have ever wanted. So I told myself: why not try Kekyll?

And here we are.

Went on a few interviews

And realized how much I needed to learn. This is not the hardest part 2018 year has to offer but it’s definitely not easy. Whether it’s OA, Phone Interview or OnSite, there’s always something I feel like desperately improving. But I honestly grateful that I was given the chance to talk to so many great engineers. I have learnt a lot just by talking to them in such short time. This group of smart people is what I want to be like in the future. Nothing more, JUST KEEP LEARNING.

Some fun parts

Favourites	Are	Here
My Favourite Band	My favorite band, hands down, goes to AJR. Their songs are always associated with deep emotions with hype beats. Some from the list: Burn the house down, Weak, Come hang out, No grass today, OVERTURE, Netflix Trip…
My Favourite Series	The Haunting of Hill House. It’s been a while since I watched a horror TV series where everything actually made sense. Rather than a bunch of jump scares, story is well written and acted.
My Favourite Book	Have to admit, I didn’t read much this year. But Identity let me think a lot. We gotta to say 2019 is not a very smooth year for the world. Agree with him or not, Fukuyama’s theory gave us a fresh explanation.
My Favourite Game	The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Yep, some of my friends just bought a Switch for it. I just started this but It’s quite relaxing to feel a game — No pressure, just take a walk.