2022 has been a year of progression for me. I have published an academic conference paper. I have decided on my career path and have also gained lots of head starts through projects and internships. I gained a ton of software engineering-related skills, and also started to LeetCode. I have transformed from a stupid programmer to a software engineer. I also learned a lot more about the industry mainly through Blind and a bit from Reddit.

I also kind of decide not to pursue a Master’s degree in the US, but work there directly instead.

Academic

2022 consists of the second half of my junior year and the first half of my senior year, and I have some major academic achievements this year.

Courses

Important courses I’ve taken this year include Operating Systems, Machine Learning, and Networking & Multimedia Lab. Operating systems really strengthen my CS fundamentals, while I completed a nice project in Networking & Multimedia lab which my interviewers often find interesting. I also learned some things in the Machine Learning course, tho not as much as I’d expected. One thing I learned from this course is that, no, I don’t want to pursue ML in MS or become a machine learning engineer or an applied scientist in the future because adjusting parameters and training models are very boring.

I’m still on my journey in Spanish learning, though tbh I’m pretty bad at it. In the listening sections of the Spanish exams, I could almost understand none of them. I am still so far away from being able to understand Messi. When I first saw the “Que mirá bobo” meme, I even had to search for what “bobo” meant.

Research

I submitted my first conference paper to an IEEE conference and got accepted! I didn’t really enjoy the research process, but having a publication feels nice. The paper-writing process is much easier than I thought. If you have all your results and figures ready, writing a paper really is merely filling in the blanks.

Software Engineering

This is my breakthrough year in software engineering. I learned so much in backend, frontend & DevOps through my course projects and internships.

Backend

I learned Go, Flask, Redis, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Rekognition, unit testing, and the microservice architecture this year.

I knew Flask existed before, but I always thoughts it was a lesser version of Django or something and never felt like picking it up. In a take-home project for one of my internship interviews, I tried it, and I was amazed by how simple and elegant it is. To start a Flask project, you only need to import it and then write less than 5 lines of code, while in Django, you’ll have to generate a bunch of files that you may not use. If you want to create a simple web app, Flask really is a no-brainer.

I finally got to learn Go and unit testing this year in my internship. Given that Go & Java are the most popular backend languages nowadays and that unit testing exists in every single half-professional project, learning them really is a huge step toward being a proper software engineer. I also got to learn microservice, a thing I shamefully had no idea about before my 3rd internship.

DevOps

I learned Screwdriver, Drone CI, GitHub Action, ArgoCD, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic BeanStalk, Firebase, GCP Cloud Run, Grafana, and Prometheus this year.

I’ve always wanted to learn AWS, and I finally get the opportunity to do that in a course project. AWS is much more intuitive than GCP imo, but it may be very biased since the last time I tried GCP is when I’m still a noob that knew almost nothing.

I picked up GCP Cloud Run after Heroku announced that free tier was no more. I use it for my side project (Playlastify). Since I don’t want to spend much time on it, a serverless option is a must, and so I tried it. It’s almost as easy as Heroku, and you can also set up a routing from Firebase, which provides a much prettier domain name than Cloud Run’s. Therefore, Firebase combined with Cloud Run is actually a Pareto improvement to Heroku. With Heroku eliminating its free tier, I’ve successfully transitioned from a local maximum to the global maxima (or maybe just a better local maximum).

In my current internship, we used ArgoCD to deploy our microservice, and the first time I understood how everything works, I was in total awe. This microservice thing finally made total sense. Being able to explain all the processes also helped me a lot in my interviews.

Frontend

I finally picked up a major frontend framework / library this year, which is Vue. I’ve tried React before, but it just feels unintuitive, plus I have no frontend project to do, so my progress stopped at a simple to-do list. This year, however, I needed to create a simple frontend for a course project, so I used the opportunity to learn Vue.

Vue is so much easier and more intuitive than React. I really really love it. I’ll still try to learn React in the future tho, since it’s the most prominent frontend framework / library.

Career

Internships

I completed my 2nd internship and started the first half of my 3rd internship this year.

Yahoo

In my 2nd internship at Yahoo as a DevOps engineer intern (oh my how many times I’ve written this sentence in my cover letters & self-intros), I didn’t learn even half of what I was expecting (certainly didn’t put in this line tho). I thought I would come back from the internship with so much systems & networking knowledge which I kind of lacked, but no, I was not able to participate in the normal day-to-day works of the production engineering team, but was instead given a small intern project which I completed in the first week of the 8-week internship.

After I completed everything in the initial project plan, my manager and mentors thought we should try to have “AI” in it. Interesting. In a DevOps internship, I was supposed to do “AI” instead of systems work. But enough rants, apart from the actual internship program, Yahoo really is a great place to work. Amazing office, free lunch with a wide variety of meals to choose from, laid-back vibes, nice people, flat organization, and generous to interns.

And even though I didn’t learn many technical skills I did get to know the typical internal tools setup of a big corp, and things like agile/scrum, ServiceNow, Yubikey, and more.

LINE

I learned most of my software engineering skills in my 3rd internship at LINE as I am directly involved in the whole development process (another LINE I frequently use during job hunting). In fact, most of the things listed in my new backend & DevOps new learnings are from this internship. However, I enjoy my time much more at Yahoo. First of all, there are so many more small regulations in LINE, which is probably one of the many common problems in the Greater East Asia Co‑Prosperity Sphere (大東亞共榮圈). Secondly, while at Yahoo, interns enjoy as many perks as full-time employees during our tenure, that isn’t the case at LINE. Many activities are FTE only, and interns even only got old MacBooks, while we got the latest version of Macbook Pro at Yahoo. This really is very important because the former owner of my current LINE Macbook seemed to be a power user, and I was left a half-worn keyboard and a very damaged battery that overheats frequently with poor battery life.

Also, the infrastructure in LINE is much worse than Yahoo in some areas. The MFA we use in Yahoo is Duo & Yubikey, but in LINE, we use email ??!! It’s so stupid. And for some reason, there isn’t a central key management system at LINE, so storing credentials becomes a problem.

It seems like I am only complaining, but both companies and their internship programs really are great! It’s just more fun to complain than to praise, as I already do a lot of that in interviews.

Job Hunting

My LeetCode count has gone from < 50 to over 200, although none of my internships nor full-time offers are a result of it.

I started applying for new grad 2023 openings in September, reaching a total of 100 applications in early December. It has been really tough, since I’m applying in the midst of the layoff / hiring freeze season, plus I was applying to almost exclusively US roles, and my fully-Taiwan experience certainly doesn’t help even with US citizenship.

I’ve got and completed a few OAs, mostly automatically sent ones, but only heard back and got the chance to interview from … let’s say less than 5. The companies giving me interviews are all not that flashy and prestigious, and the interviews were pretty easy, easier than my internship interviews even, though I’m also a much stronger candidate with better behavioral skills, technical knowledge and experience than I was before.

Since I’m located in Taiwan, I have to stay up late and find a quiet place at midnight to interview as I lived in my 4-people dorm. I’m glad that the efforts haven’t gone to waste. I’m also surprised by my English speaking, because I almost never find any difficulties interviewing and expressing myself in English, even when facing behavioral questions that I haven’t prepared for.

Not going to reveal my offers just yet.

Music

My major discovery this year would be Aurora. I’ll break down my music listening into different parts with last.fm stats.

Why not use Spotify Wrapped?

For some reason, probably marketing one, Spotify Wrapped only includes the first ten months of the year, so it’s useless.

Why not use some 3rd party Spotify stats tools then?

Because, for some reason, the top artists & top songs api returns “user’s top artists or tracks based on calculated affinity” i.e. it’s not directly your listening time or scrobbles. If you compare your last.fm stats and Spotify API return value over the same period, your top artists would actually be quite different. Therefore, last.fm or 3rd party tools using last.fm API are the only solution.

Top artists

AURORA

I literally only discovered and started to listen to Aurora in mid-December, yet she still made it to the very top of my 2022 artists. I really was binge-listening to her for the final 2 weeks of the year.

It all started from a youtube comment. I was then hooked by Drones by Novaa, and found this comment under its Youtube MV:

And then I just started digging. At first I was not too impressed. Her voice sounded nice, but her songs overall were just a bit strange. But then I went to this “AURORA Acoustic” playlist, and damn her voice was soothing. So I just kept listening and adding the songs I like. I don’t like most of the songs in her “Step 2” album tho. Not my taste.

Favorite song of hers is Everything Matters. Her voice in that song is just amazing, especially in this live. This is probably my most-watched youtube vid ever. Love her hand movements.

Ollie MN

According to last.fm, I started to listen to Ollie MN in late December, 2021, so he can probably still be counted as my discovery in 2022. He started out as a Youtuber I think, but has been inactive for some years. His songs are so damn soothing and peaceful, can literally cure all of my depression (tho I have none).

Nick Leng

Also a crazy entry. Discovered him in early December in my Discover Weekly playlist, and then binge listened to him for like a week. Favorite song of his is Lemons.

Top Songs

Listening Time

Genre

Sports

Not much can be said say in this regard. I stopped going to Judo club since I’m too busy, but I did go to Taekwondo club in the first half of the year and passed the black belt exam in early September. I haven’t got the belt yet but only the news that I’ve passed so I’ll reserve my happiness for the day I actually receive the belt.

As for football, yeah I still play it, and I’m more than happy that Messi finally gets his well-deserved world cup trophy with the power of anulo mufa.

Looking Forward

Things I wish to accomplish in 2023:

• Get more offers
• Read DDIA
• Breeze through LC hards