As a grown-up, the last decade is the period of me receiving higher education and adopting a particular role in the society. I start making decisions that will greatly affect my life, and be responsible for myself.
In the last 3 years, I have been through the startup stage, designer, a product manager, and lastly, become a professional software engineer. Yes, I had experienced a lot of stages and gained a lot of frontline experience, but my true passion has always been designing software, and beyond that, building products. I started to wonder, what kind of person shall I strive to be. Will I slowly promote into management level and leading teams? Or will I become a successful rock star developer, making cool projects and widely used by developers?
Yes, these are considered decent life paths, noble pursuits. Which I agree, at least before I evaluated myself.
Self-Reflection
The year 2020 has been the worst year for everyone. Huge economical impact to small-medium enterprises and retailers as the pandemic bursts. To overcome this, the Malaysia government released a movement control act to restrict our social activity - no more unnecessary gathering and must work from home. Therefore I got more me time by working from home.
When it comes to lifetime pursuit, I shall first pursue freedom for the sake of creating better standards. As a software developer, my goal is to achieve technical freedom, but that doesn't mean that I am allowed to write deliberate and without employer's consent. Instead, is to not limit myself in a particular area.
In my personal point of view, we have to deepen our understanding in our working field, and then transfer the knowledge and understanding to other area when you study. It will end up bring up inspiration
I am the product of many coincidences. I starting by cracking wifis and writing shellcodes. For some resason, I thought my career will be in cybersecurity area. But my interest in programming and product building eventually turns me into a software developer.
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I start to learn programming during my highschool, I fiddle with gameboy advance emulator and I start researching on cheat codes and got understanding of machine instructions.
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I try to crack wifi network - YES, I did a lot of stupid stuff when I was young. But that makes me familiar with IEEE802.11 protocols.
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I made a batch file that will wiped user's pendrive storage, and I accidentally wiped my computer's main storage. Then I became a long time Linux OS user.
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I made a group with my friends and start sharing cybersecurities information, and learn to write low-level stuff - Like C language and Python
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Joined a startup company, finally I have the chance to witness my written codes got deployed on clouds and being used publicly. And know how to manage expectations from my working partners.
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I later joined a payment aggregator startup company, learnt some finance knowledge and start reviewing codes and optimizing workflow.
Without any one of those having occurred, I might not have started to write code in the first place. Which might have been better for my long-term goal, because I consistently frustrate myself trying and failing to understand concepts or complete projects.
Stay awoke
I once worked in a weird branding studio that they stated they are constantly hiring CTO all the time. They week I got hired, they assigned me a task which is to revamp their website. But I don't have any prior knowledge of front end engineer and aesthetics sense in terms of landing page. So I spendt several weeks not understanding the difference between CSS margin and padding, trying to make a landing page.
I only grasped the difference year later. Until I got time to really sit down and read through the documentation from MDN. The working environment there is so dynamic and intense that we often need to get the design works done in a very short timeline, in there I got no time to do self improvement which makes me frustrated.
I quit the job after the probation period and joined another fintech company. I realise that the ridiculous workload of my previous company is actually the product of many factors: their messy project management, designer's market value, and the contract itself. Fintech company producing much more value and much more impact to the consumer market, and being one of the developers in this area is much more time-salary-efficient.
I agree at the idea of "20% projects" from Google, and I tend to make a small project after working hours. It can be a library, a programming language, or a unfinished script. I try not be a work machine, and be sustainable in term of my career path.
What is next?
I decide to learn writing, targeting to produce at least one short article per week. Writing is one of the ways to express my vast, oceanic soul. To master such critical skill is my long term goal, and I will try my best to write as much, and concise as I can.
I also took a degree programme in Computer Science recently and I would like to learn Programming Language Theory. Before that I was learning abstract algebra to make myself capable of understand mathematics papers during the progress of Haskell project developement.
Not only that, I will try to ship products. Be prolific. Produce better result by iterating and learning from the mistakes you made. People make mistakes, and that is totally okay.