life is good i just ate some chocolate cake and drank tea
what the fk is up lads.
its ur boy.
this is actually my 34th weekly update.
i’m surprised im still making these.
i’m more surprised you’re still reading them.
u damn fools.
lets jump into the week :).
Some Progress
These last 4 weeks have been a struggle because I’ve been trying to figure out a new thing to work on. Spoiler alert: I’m stilling struggling, but less!
It’s been quite difficult. I’m essentially defined by the problems I solve and the things I create. So, if I’m not working on something I find interesting I’m just going to burn out and do a shit job.
Around 4-5 times in the last month, I literally started working on something and then stopped because I just lost steam. I’m not one to work on something I’m not hyped about. Sure, I have a list of 500+ ideas on my iPhone. But which ones do I actually want to spend more than 1 hour on?
Life is to short to work on stuff you aren’t hyped about.
I asked my friend Furqan for advice last week. He helped make things more clear for me.
Yah.
I can get behind that.
I’ve been trying so hard to find problems for me to solve. Instead, why not find stuff I truly care about + enjoy and go from there?
In fact, in the past, this is how I always did things! I learned ML because I thought it’d be cool to improve esports analytics. I learned web development because I wanted to make websites for gamers. I learned computer vision because I wanted to make self-driving cars.
But, it seems that I strayed away from that mindset after college and the Silicon Valley mantra pushed me more in the direction of “only work on problems that can become billion-dollar businesses and scale to millions of users and make a lot of $”.
So, I started looking into things I think would be just cool to work on: blockchain, drones, educational tools, cyber security, learning piano, and other random stuff.
I think by this time next week I’ll be working on something I’m hyped about :).
Tutoring
I started teaching a kid how to code last week. His goal is to make a Minecraft mod. He’s 11. I simply show up once a week and teach him. In class #1, I gave him my Rasberry Pi, had him set it up from scratch, and started teaching him terminal commands + Python (all through the Pi). In two hours he was effortlessly able to navigate around his terminal with commands like: “cd” and “pwd”. He then built his first Python program and ran it from his own Terminal. Like a freaking boss. The speed at which he picked all this up blew my mind. Like holy shit. He’s 11. This took me days to understand in college. By the end of class #1, he was making “stories” through code using time.sleep() and print statements where the program would tell you a story.
Wow.
I’ll keep you guys posted on his progress :).
FarzaLogs
I told you guys last week about a tool I made for myself called FarzaLogs. How’s it going? Have I been keeping up with it? Well. See for yourself.
I really like this tool. Whenever I feel like I wasted a day (as I have been feeling often), I can simply look at the logs and understand the exact actions I took to waste that day and try and avoid those actions next time.
To make it clear, I didn’t make this to optimize my time. I don’t care about that. I made it so I could easily document where my days were going and how I could perhaps spend them doing more stuff I like. Also because it’s fun to log everything :).
Another Company
Been spending a lot of time entertaining the idea of working for another company. I’m not that against the idea tbh. Working somewhere like Webflow, Stripe, Twitter, Google, Microsoft can teach you a lot depending on your mindset. If you work for Microsoft with the mindset of “I’m going to work on cool stuff and become a better engineer” I think that’s a pretty meh mindset that won’t take you that far. If I ended up joining Microsoft (which I have been looking into), I’d enter with the mindset of “Okay, so how do I become CEO of this place?”.
Anyways. I just wanted to mention that I am entertaining the idea! I’d be a fool not to. Everyone always says “blah blah joining big company means you won’t start a company blah blah betrayal blah blah”, but honestly it’s all just mindset. If you are comfy at you $140K a year job @ Google and don’t aim for the moon you will just rot there until the company dies.
Anyways.
UNTIL NEXT TIME.
-Farza