Missed the mid-year birthday post, oh wells. Let's recap last year's resolutions!
Start volunteering / donating. Made a donation at the end of the year to Khan Academy. Now looking to start volunteering at places in SF. It's important to remember to give back. I've always been of the mindset that you have to help yourself before you can truly help others, more for optimization. I'm pretty lucky at the age of 25 to be fairly stable financially and decided it's time. I don't want to be a person that keeps saying "I need to do better before giving back" because that time will never come. Failure!!!! Surprised at this one. This should have been easy. Other than giving some food to the homeless this wasn't accomplished at all =(. Not even about not being well off enough to give back, this is too lazy to give back.... I even remember looking up volunteering services, I could have even volunteered for events at work that did non profit work.
I did donate ad dollars to cancer association to bring more attention to their cause. It's still not the same as being their in person.
Do a stand up comedy show. This got pushed back for far too long, finally did it at Redwood City Underground last week. Woot! Even got some laughs =D
Haven't done stand up again. Laziness to blame.
Deciding to move to a larger city. This one was pretty easy since my rent is up at the end of this month anyways. Signed the lease today, moving to SF, which I wasn't particulary happy about. Been in cities before (Boston/NYC), don't really take advantage of what it has to offer (don't drink so bars aren't a plus). But there should be lots to do and it's an easy way to force myself to be more active.
Biggest mistake of the year. Commute totaled 3-4 hrs a day. Didn't do much in the city as I thought.
Six-pack, yea... vain, was so close several times, darn you school and actual jobs!! California now, no hibernation weight and work/life balance is pretty good. This year!!! Come on!!
Failure!!! Started actually exercising mid-year. Still 175lbs, but big difference in strength. 0 pull ups -> 5 rep max, bicep curls from 1 rep max of 30lb -> 50lb.
Getting rid of car. Sending this back east next week. Was never one of those kids that needed a car when they turned legal driving age. Just a liability, and several accidents later...(worst asian ever!!...or most typcial asian ever!! you decide).
Great decision here. Life without a car totally doable.
Build a mobile/web application. Putting this one off for way too long. This is more skill building than anything else. Job doesn't require it, but learning in itself is good, can't let that bootcamp money go to waste.
Failure. Kinda saw this one coming. Motivation not there anymore for this one. Knowing myself, if there's not a need for it, it ain't happening.
Dating, cause relationships are a thing.
Burned out on dating in the beginning of my move. Went from 1 a week to ~1 month after the first 2 months.
2016 Resolutions:
6 pack..still want those abs. Getting a personal trainer now. Goal is to keep muscle gain and lose the fat. Hoping for abs around 160-165lb. When I was close to having them before I was at 155lb (lanky asian).
Write a novel. Working on it, mix of Gulliver's Travel + Gattica + Brave New World. Nanowrimo failed.
Move back Penninsula/Southbay by end of Feb. Looking at you Palo Alto!!!
Career, I'm so mixed on this. Have been for the last 1-2 years now. Life goals and accomplishments. Meaning of life stuff.
Become a Let's Player. VR is coming and I want to be apart of that!
Didn't want to write this until I crushed some goals already.
Start volunteering / donating. Made a donation at the end of the year to Khan Academy. Now looking to start volunteering at places in SF. It's important to remember to give back. I've always been of the mindset that you have to help yourself before you can truly help others, more for optimization. I'm pretty lucky at the age of 25 to be fairly stable financially and decided it's time. I don't want to be a person that keeps saying "I need to do better before giving back" because that time will never come.
Do a stand up comedy show. This got pushed back for far too long, finally did it at Redwood City Underground last week. Woot! Even got some laughs =D
Deciding to move to a larger city. This one was pretty easy since my rent is up at the end of this month anyways. Signed the lease today, moving to SF, which I wasn't particulary happy about. Been in cities before (Boston/NYC), don't really take advantage of what it has to offer (don't drink so bars aren't a plus). But there should be lots to do and it's an easy way to force myself to be more active.
Six-pack, yea... vain, was so close several times, darn you school and actual jobs!! California now, no hibernation weight and work/life balance is pretty good. This year!!! Come on!!
Getting rid of car. Sending this back east next week. Was never one of those kids that needed a car when they turned legal driving age. Just a liability, and several accidents later...(worst asian ever!!...or most typcial asian ever!! you decide).
Build a mobile/web application. Putting this one off for way too long. This is more skill building than anything else. Job doesn't require it, but learning in itself is good, can't let that bootcamp money go to waste.
Finished probabilities and most of stats on Khan Academy last month. The working out and sleeping goal...work in progress (i.e. failed!).
Half way through July already. It's been a pretty good month at work, made some hires, might be working on new roles in the coming weeks. Tomorrow, I'm gonna be 6 months into my contract at FB, so halfway through my 1 year, kinda nervous on what the future holds in this department. Guessing most people don't realize this outside of the recruitment industry, but it's mostly just contracts and agencies. Not a very stable career, but few are these days.
I said before that my brain needs to feel like it's going to explode every once in a while, it's how I know learning is taking place, that my brain is pushed to its edges. Feeling a bit burnt doing this every month though so I'm gonna do something more creative.
Always wanted to try stand up comedy. So July goal is gonna be coming up with a 5-15 min bit that I can do at a club. Should be fun until dry mouth hits from stage fright haha....hehe...
Overall experience with the Surface Pro 3 has been mediocre. I was leaning towards keeping it since it was lightweight, full Windows OS, could handle a VM with 8gb, touch screen, and could learn to draw on it with the stylus included. BUT, the battery either completely died or something is wrong with the software detecting it so back to the store it goes (Please don't make me pay restocking fees!!).
Below is my experience with the Surface Pro 3.
NOTE: I orginally had that the below was a review of the product, but as chton on Hacker News pointed out it really was just listing the flaws. The Surface 2 in 1 tablet/pc is something I've really wanted for a while now, but I think the execution on the software side fell short. While the battery should be replaceable under warranty I just don't have the confidence to keep the device, especially at a total price tag of $1,400+ (keyboard price included). The Machine
Date Bought: June 22, 2014
Model: 256GB i5
Retail Cost: $1,299 + tax (in California so there's plenty of that)
The Surface Pro 3 had a quality build, it felt like a premium product.
Usage
Web Browsing
Trying Drawing Apps
Watching/Streaming Videos
Playing Asphalt 8 (Sad I know. I easily get addicted to games and play for a few hours a day until deleting it.)
The most intensive things here would probably be streaming videos and video gaming.
NOTE: This was the first time I saw it in recovery mode. This was my 2nd try on demonstrating the battery issue and was probably the cause of the recovery mode screen.
The Surface had a problem recognizing battery after its first week. Wasn't really much of problem as it would display the percentage of charge after restarting. Today, the thing completely died. It won't work without being plugged in anymore.
Keyboard
So this thing costs $129... I read that it was a mechanical keyboard so I got a bit excited since I heard those were fantastic for typing. Wrong, other than the nice felt backing the keyboard felt really cheap. Bad experience with this keyboard.
Its really thin so there's not much key travel and the track pad was not responsive for the most part (I heard it was actually quite an improvement over older models). The mouse would skip and on certain apps it would stop registering the clicks and I had to resort to using the touch screen to close windows and tap search bars so at least I could type with the keyboard.
Once something on the keyboard forced the Narration Help setting on. Something must've jammed with the 'L" key as it went alway when I hit it. This is a crazy situation where it kept rejecting my sign in password since some keys weren't registering.
After starting up after a night it would have limited wifi access until it restarted.
Pen Sensitivity
The pen is a cool feature / add on for the product. It was a pretty big bonus for me as I always wanted to get a Cintiq or something similar.
Out of the box, sensitivity for the pen was pretty bad for most apps. I had to press extremely hard to get the bold lines. Actually writing with it was too light (super light gray). Things got a lot better after downloading the Wintab drivers. After the download it felt pretty good and the pressure was similar to actually writing with a pen.
UI (User Interface) / Software
First, you probably have to change browsers if you're using Chrome. Windows 8 Chrome is pretty bad and DPI apparently isn't good in Chrome so at the screen ratio and resolution of the Surface will make it extremely obvious. The main problem is text on web pages. Very distorted especially when comparing to other browsers. Would recommended switching to FireFox or IE (yea...I just recommended IE, gives myself chills).
The UI is confusing. Activating menus by sliding from the top of the screen, initiating triple split screens, figuring out what Metro apps are running by sliding from the left side of the screen and hovering back to the left (other wise it switches from current app)..., apps that similary followed this design, and apps that when resized you lose options!! Yea you can't get certain options on apps without it being full sized, there was no way I could tell how to get them back, these are things like creating new pages, choosing paint color, or drawing mediums. The insanity of it all!!!
I had no clue where the files were being saved to either for most of the apps. Things like the voice recording (it came with 2 or 3 voice recording apps and one of them asked where to save it, thank goodness) and drawings I couldn't find on the desktop when searching so I guess they're just within the apps themselves?
I did end up getting used to Metro (Modern UI?). Read an article that said it was designed this way because most people pinned apps to the task bar and MS decided to redo it this way instead of the regular desktop. Overall, still used the regular desktop more, but Metro isn't as bad as I thought it once was.
Had my birthday last month, 25 now... The number of changes in the past year has been crazy. I finally made it out of the north east to sunny California. The future looks pretty bright *knocks on wood*.
May Goals: I made it through some math portions on Khan Academy and started on probabilities. The lessons takes a lot longer to get through now, probabilities, they're tricky haha.
June Goals: Given my current rate of self learning, I expect to finish probabilities and statistics portion by end of this month. I'm also working out again. Fitness goal is to work out 3 times a week and get at least 8 hrs of sleep (I have a feeling the sleep goal is gonna be harder to hit).
Sharing a write up I
did previously. Many people know about in-house recruiters that are directly
employed by a company. This post will cover a lesser-known recruitment type,
RPO. RPOs have similar functions to a standard
recruitment agency, but there are major differences between the two. Major differences between an RPO and a standard
recruitment agency:
Representing the Account
Responsibilities and Access to ATS (Applicant
Tracking System)
Payment Structure
Representing the Account
An RPO is similar to a recruitment agency, but
the employees there have the privilege of representing themselves as the
account they work on to candidates. Example provided below.
Recruiter working for a regular recruitment
agency hiring for a position at Amazon.com:
“Hi. My name is David from XYZ agency and I have
a position that you may be interested in.”
Recruiter working at an RPO on the Amazon.com
account:
“Hi. My name is David. I'm working with Amazon's (or any other big name) recruitment team and I have a position that you may be interested in.”
The difference is small between the
introductions, but it makes a large difference to the candidate especially if
it is from a well known company. In the recruitment business it can mean either
the start of a conversation, or being promptly cut off with a dial tone.
Responsibilities and Access to ATS (Applicant
Tracking System)
RPOs work to promote their account. This ranges
from creating news letters, candidate pipelines, and job postings. In addition
to this we have full access to the client's ATS. An ATS is the system that
resumes and contact information funnel into once candidates have applied to a
position. Having access to a client's ATS is one of the reasons why RPOs can
disclose specific job postings and companies versus agency recruiters who do
not disclose this information.
Payment Structure
Agencies and RPOs both receive payment on
positions they fill. A major fear of an agency recruiter is a candidate finding
the company's job posting and applying directly. In this way the agency does
not get paid unless they presented the candidate's information to the hiring
manager before the candidate applied themselves. RPOs on the other hand freely
disclose how to apply directly, in fact applying directly is a part of the
process of getting hired.
RPOs charge a flat rate for the position that is
being filled, it doesn't matter if the candidate found the position by
themselves, an internal employee referred them, or even if the hiring manager
referred the candidate (yes, this one is quite the easy hire). The amount
charged per position depends on the seniority of the position, but it is
usually several times less than the 20%-30% of a first year salary that recruitment
agencies usually charge.
I hope this broad explanation of an RPO and how
they are different from recruitment agencies has helped those that are
interested in the subject.
I really slacked off during my middle school / high school days. Prime example of a procrastinator. Failed AP Calc, passed Calc and Stats in college, and never took another math class again. I really did enjoy stats, much more practical in day to day life.
There are gaping holes in my math abilities. I usually did well enough to pass, but that's horrible since this left me with a swiss cheese foundation. Probably didn't retain 90%+ of what I "learned" in school. I think the biggest problem is that there was no connection to how applicable this is to the "real world", most likely why I liked stats, I saw that it was useful in determining bias with data that we're constantly bombarded with.
May Goal
Utilizing Khan Academy I plan to get through Algebra II, maybe even Probability and Statistics, by the end of May. Courses I'm going to skip include Geometry and Trig since I consider them vastly difference than what I think is relavent for Machine Learning, unless I'm going to concentrate on Computer Vision. I have to consider whether or not to do Calculus, this will largely depend on what the Prob/Stats course will cover.
Finished all 3 units of Google's Making Sense of Data course today. It took about a week to finish without doing the final projects.
What I was expecting: Introduction to data science and learning statistical methods.
What I got: Introduction on how to read graphs, empirical research, and Fusion Table.
This was a super basic course. I wouldn't recommend to anyone that has taken basic stats already. This course really acts as a tutorial for Fusion Tables, a Google product that's an extension of their Spreadsheet. Fusion Table feels clunky, but the I love how easy it was to visualize the data, I mean, we even get heat maps. =D
I like how they UI of the course probably better than the Edx course, but the layout is practically identical.
Gonna see if Andrew Ng's ML class has a stats prereq so I can start diving in and create that Singularity.
One the big things I wanted to pick up from the MITx course was how to determine O notation (time complexity). The course did a fairly good job of explaining it and I passed most of the quizzes on it, though my n log n understanding still needs work.
The last weeks of the course covered decision trees. I'm going to agree with commenters that this section feels rushed and was quite confusing for me to understand what it is suppose to do to writing code for it.
I did skip a few things like classes and object oriented programming since I did most of it during the bootcamp I attended.
Overall: This is a solid overview of python and how to develop time efficient algorithms. I think this covers a lot more detail than just the Codeacademy course on Python.
Testing Careers
I think going through the bootcamp was a great way to figure out if I wanted to do software development as a career, to a lesser extent I think this course helps with that decision as well. For me, these types of courses helps connect the dots that traditional school wasn't able to do. I learned skills from the courses, then was made to complete assignments that can be applied to real world situations right away.
The next courses I'm looking to take are in Machine Learning and Data Science. Since most investments/decisions are data driven these days, having knowledge of stats is super important. I enjoyed statistics when in school because it seemed so practical, especially in reading studies that we're bombarded with everyday and knowing what the conclusions actually mean and questioning methods that a study uses.
The bright side for me is, a lot of Machine Learning and Data Science in companies require programming skills as well. To develop the tools to analyze information, storing and pulling data from databases, and parsing documents.
Let's get started with all that has happened since the end of the bootcamp.
Coding Dojo
Facebook
Self-learning (April Goals)
Coding Dojo
After the bootcamp I got a part-time offer from the school to be a Student Advisor. Created some recruiting courses/videos and also meeting with individual students on how to write resumes, interpret interview processes, and how to handle salary negotiations.
At the end, about wooing Google and Facebook. Funny thing, got in process for both of these companies for Sourcer roles. Facebook was super fast in getting the interview set up and got the offer same day =). As a Sourcer/Recruiter seeing how fast a company moves in the candidate stage is really important because it will be something I will be a part of. Didn't get to the on-site interviews with Google before accepting the offer from FB, maybe in the future.
I'm currently on a 1 year contract with Facebook, started this January. It has been an amazing here. Everyone is super communicative and helpful. The level of access to hiring teams is incredibile, I can literally walk to up to their desks. I've already had meetings with managers, directors, and heads of departments. Just a great experience.
April Goals: Self-learning
Haven't done goals in quite a while. Self-learning has definitely been slacking. So for April goals I'm looking to complete Mitx Intro to Computer Science and Programming to build more of a foundation in creating algorithms. It's an 8 week course, but I think I should be able to do it in half the time if I really dedicate myself.
Let’s get this out of the way. I’m an indecisive person. I’m the guy that’ll be in store looking at 2-10 different bottles of sunblock for an hour while one of my best friends is standing there with his hand freezing because he got a gallon of milk (thanks Kyle for always putting up with me!!!). All the while thinking this would have been much easier if I had only done the 2-4 weeks of research I usually do before buying a product (not joking).
Knowing the above, the world of programming is my own little level of Dante’s Inferno. So many choices from languages to frameworks. I went to a coding bootcamp and I took a very shallow dive into several languages, now it’s time to take a deep dive into a stack (frontend and backend). This came down to JavaScript, JavaScript/Python, or Google’s new language Dart.
It has been utter turmoil for me the past few weeks as I took a shallow look at these languages. The real decision was between JavaScript and its new competitor Dart. I’m a calculated risk type of guy and Dart is definitely a high risk / high reward scenario for Google, but what about the common man? This is where practicality wins out. I’m going to be learning JavaScript, for how long? Until I make something presentable for a project!! So months at least.
There are a lot of reasons to pick JavaScript over Dart, but the main reason for me, legacy code (ewww). Like it or not most of the web has some sort of JavaScript in it and it’s still worth learning now even as Ecmascript 6 is soon to be released, and all the frameworks that came out in the past few years are gaining traction. While learning Dart is something I still plan to do it isn’t worth being the first language I take a deep dive into because when I look for a position as a programmer I will most likely still need to deal with JavaScript code and it will be expected that I know it.
So for all the new programmers out there trying to make this decision I hope you found this helpful. I only stated one reason to learn JavaScript, but I think it’s the most important one when picking a first language. A language you will have to deal with anyways. Right now choosing to not learn JavaScript is like choosing to not learn HTML/CSS.
This post explains what is eloquent code to me and why. Note that I am still within my first year of learning to code when writing this so take it with a mountain of salt.
Before learning how to program I kept hearing about the concept of eloquent code.The word eloquent by itself vague so understandably it will mean different things to different people. Most commonly, it can mean readability, maintainability, pretty (aka syntactic sugar), well commented, efficiency (code that executes a function the fastest), or having the least lines possible to run a program.
During my bootcamp the class had algorithms to solve and we would present our answers. This gave us a chance to see how each person thinks, represented by their code. When comparing my answers to others I noticed mine was simple and straightforward, maybe that’s because I’m simple minded. I have a tendency to minimize the amount of methods already available within the language, didn’t include regex (regular expressions), and didn’t get fancy with manipulating attributes, though I understand these are needed to complete certain tasks more efficiently (time to code and runtime).
My concept of eloquent code derives from understandability. It is as follows understandable->readable->well structured->maintainable.
Understandable code is:
Readable: A person should be able to look at the code and understand what is trying to be accomplished. Preferably, this is by reading the actual code instead of just the comments.
Well Structured: To obtain readability overtime the code base must be well organized. This means a person can find what they are looking for within a code base.
Maintainable: Because the code base is readable and well structured it is going to be more maintainable (updating/editing current code base).
Well, that wasn’t vague at all (/sarcasm). This is my general concept of eloquent code. What it means to be understandable and its derivatives will be up to each person and company to define. Just make sure to document so people don’t forget.
There are definite limitations to this concept. For instance, maintaining legacy code millions of lines long. This concept will only work when starting out or if the person/company have the ability to re-write the entire code base.
A friend once told me great code will look like only one person has written it, no matter how many people collaborated. There’s a lot of information in that one statement, and hopefully I unpacked it well in this post.
Moving onto Git and using the terminal. Learning about Version Control Systems (VCS) is something that is becoming much more common. I remember sourcing for a position that required SVN (another VCS) and very few people listed it on their skill set, at least for Tool Developers. These systems saves all the changes made by people working on a project. Anywhere along the process the person in control of the project can revert back to a previous version.
I used to work out of Google Docs and shared network files and sometimes it just became a mess. A person would overwrite a file and we would lose everything, weeks, sometimes months worth of data. Dropbox also saves different versions of your files which is quite handy.
Overall: Feels like I'm making progress. Continuing to learn about Git after class. Few more days and I expect to start Ruby next Monday.
OMG!!!! 4 hours of my life gone! Tried to figure out what was wrong with my database connection since nothing new showed up when inserting a new user. Hours later I see that deleting my current rows of data that I inserted manually revealed all the previous information.
Restarted MySQL Workbench, now everything works.
Nothing like spending 4 hours debugging something that wasn't broken. *sad panda* *angry panda* *sad panda* *sleepy panda*
As a former Recruiter and Sourcer I viewed hundreds of resumes per day. And to be frank, most of them sucked. Listing a few of the reasons why they sucked:
Sections of experience, eduction, projects, and others were not placed in the conventional manner
Using words like "help" or "assisted" when they played a critical role on a project
Design / color
Lack of contact information
Photos and other personal information that were not related to the job
In addition to fixing some of these mistakes we also went over how to deal with agency recruiters, setting timelines for hiring process, and salary negotiations if you think you quoted too low of a salary in the initial phone screen.
I'm happy to say that in less than 24 hours my classmate that posted his resume was contacted by 5 different recruiters and is already setting up interviews ranging from San Francisco to San Diego.
Overall: I'm always glad to be able to help and to see results this quickly really made my day.
Also, in the past 2 days I finished my Google Directions API assignment and started my advanced OOP. The OOP is giving me a bit of trouble, but onwards I go and hopefully starting on Version Control tomorrow.
4 more weeks left. All there's left on the curriculum are 2 weeks of projects and learning Ruby and Rails. This weekend I finished 2 assignments in OOP and went back to AJAX API assignments.
APIs are extremely useful since it allows you to retrieve data from other web applications like Google Maps for directions or any Weather APIs for local weather info.
Overall: I'm spending 7 days a week at the Dojo currently. It is quite exhausting, but to cover and understand this much material with no background in programming it's what I have to do.
The thing to remember is not to shy away from hard work. And starting strong only matters if you finish strong.
Getting to the OOP section and understanding the workings of classes, private, protected, and public properties and methods.
I had some experience with this before going through the Codeacademy Ruby track. Can't wait to start using it large programs where its real strength comes out.
We are also presenting our application idea(s) to the class tomorrow. Listening to advise and requesting help for certain parts of the application if needed.
Overall: I think I have a pretty solid idea that I would like to make a web application and mobile application out of. Most likely going to start it a bit before the last week of the bootcamp and use next week catching up and start on Ruby. It's much more important to me to solidify my knowledge base of the current section and get a head start if possible after next week than to have a mediocore project that I might want to redo using another technology like Rails.
So we found out at the end of the day that we're going to be having a hackathon against the Seattle class next week. Suprise, we're doing it in JavaScript, so we have to learn JavaScript lol. Our instructors were making a course for it anyways and this will be a fun way to motivate students. The trash talking has already began from our northern brothers and it would be rude if we did not respond in kind ;) .
Additional news, signing up for Meetups. Two so far, the first will be in Mountain View to hopefully see Matz, creator of Ruby, speak. The second, a workshop for Ruby on Rails at the TapJoy location in San Francisco.
Overall: We're all starting to get into networking mode. Concentrating on our learning will always come first, but for those of us that are planning to stay networking is essential to land our first positions out of the bootcamp and can't be ignored.
Finally finished my pagination this morning!! Thanks to the help of my classmates Jeffrey, Juan, and Jerry! hmmm all of which starts with a Js.
Going over the assingment today in our afternoon lecture I also found out that this is the most advanced assignment we have in AJAX, even though it is listed as intermediate the pagination was added later which increased the difficulty level passed the current advanced assignment.
Going to finish my advanced AJAX tomorrow which involved allowing a user to post, edit, and delete notes. Then starting on OOP later in the day.
Overall: Project week is next week. We're given the option to catch up on courses if we're behind, move ahead in the course work, or doing a project. I'm most likely going to be catching up and moving ahead on class work during next week. We're suppose to have 2 projects done by the end, but I feel that having 1 great project is better than having 2 mediocore projects.
I had 2 projects in mind, both of which can probably be built out using what we have covered in the course. One is heavy on user inputted information so lots of tables for MySQL and the other utlizing APIs for most of the information.
