Of Fulfilling Weeks and Self-Assessment

After a long day at work today, having struggled with a critical bug for the past few days, and having finally found a breakthrough to the solution, I return home to conclude what could be considered as a fulfilling week.

I order some food, and tune in to my watch later playlist on youtube. After dinner over loads of jovial banter and jokes with my flatmates, I find myself retiring into the solace of my room.

I switch to the dim lights and put on some Norah Jones to let her voice help me unwind as I recollect the events of the entire last week. I glance at the scribblings on the whiteboard behind my closed door, showing me the incomplete wireframes of a side project. Distant echoes of a train persistently chugging along it’s tracks remind me of being far from home.

There are primarily 5 questions that I ask myself at the end of each work week, that help me assess my personal growth and direction.

1. Did I learn something new at my primary skill?
2. Did I learn something new beyond my primary skill?
3. Did I make full use of the opportunities that I had?
4. Did I expand my network?
5. Am I a better me than what I was last week?

I won’t lie and say that I honestly answer positively to all the above five assertions every week. That would be really tough to achieve, and I am yet to attain that level of self discipline and integrity (if ever). But the few weeks that I do, it gives me immense pleasure and a sense of fulfilment. And that is a really good motivator for the week ahead.

Learning, networking, and grabbing every opportunity that comes my way constitute the core part of how I enjoy functioning. There are often weeks where I end up learning nothing new, or networking with no new people, or missing a lot of opportunities that came my way. Those weeks are boring and make me wonder why time machines haven’t been invented and commercialised yet.

TLDR;

You’re no better than you were last week if you haven’t learnt something new, haven’t expanded your comfort zone, haven’t expanded your network, and haven’t made best use of all/most (of) the opportunities that you had.

 

Late Night Jitters of Unwanted Work

I often find myself lost between expansive periods of wasted time and an incorrigible bout of productivity loss. And within that abyss, all I’m thinking about is how to come out of it.

Unwanted work is probably one of my biggest weaknesses. That is why I know that I’ll never be able to work at some place where my job satisfaction is zero even if everything else soars high above the ceilings.

It happens. I’ve never really tried to avoid it. I guess that would be because I like to work. I understand the value of work and the experience that comes along with every line of code written. And that is what leads me to my demise. I never say no.

I guess I should start saying no to a few projects that arrive in the future, and believe that by saying ‘no’ to it, I will not be losing an opportunity, but will be making myself available for other opportunities.

I need time for myself. I need time to work on things that I’m inherently excited about. And if that should mean the sacrifice of a few opportunities, so be it!

Life without internet?

I woke up today morning to find out that my internet connection was down. In fact, all the wired telephones in my house were dead.

I turned on my PC, and suddenly I had nothing to do! No internet!

An hour later, everything was back to normal as the lines were fixed and I was back on the internet.

After 5 minutes…

I still had nothing to do!

<facepalm>

Hello World

Hello world?

I’ve always wondered why this was the first thing people write when trying out something new.

Much like every other question possibly related to code, someone had already asked this question on Stack Overflow.

Apparently the very first ‘Hello World’ program was written by Brian Kernighan as part of the documentation for I/O section of the BCPL programming language manual. This code was also used for testing of the C compiler and hence made its way into Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie’s book on C which was published in 1972. And again, later, it was also one of the first programs used to test Bjarne Stoustroup’s C++ compiler.

Ha! Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Bjarne Stoustroup! No wonder people have been using it ever since.

Anyway!

Hello World!