College be hitting different lately

Hey! 👋

It has been a while since I’ve written anything on this blog hahahah. It’s been more than 3 years since my last post. I’ve been really busy with college and work that I haven’t had much time to write anything—or do anything besides work and college, really—so I decided to break the cycle and try to do something that I love and used to do, which is writing!

It’s been quite stressful recently since most of my days consist of an endless cycle of work and college—which mostly just me doing boring assignments and mundane work, it gets boring quite fast—I don’t get to write anything interesting in my day job either, just a bunch of boring web develoment stuff. I don’t feel like I’m learning something new.

So, I decided to take a break from it and do different things to learn something new! I don’t want to keep this cycle any longer. Fortunately, I’m currently on a year break from going to college for “internship”—which is actually me going to work as usual minus the college—so yeah, this is perfect to try and do something new.

A lot of things have changed ever since last time I wrote something on this blog—both from my side and from the world around me. I just want to reflect on it and share some of the things I’ve learned along the way.

Please, do bear in mind, this is me sharing my own experience, very subjectively. If you don’t agree with me then I’m okay with that! Differences in opinion are good :)

Where was I again?

I started this blog around 2020-2021 when I was still a high school student. Due to COVID-19, I had a lot of free time to do different things that I found interesting.

The last time I wrote something here was in 2022—back when I was still a high school student. It’s been 3 years at the time of writing this, I’ve got a year left before I finally graduate, time really flies huh. Looking back at my old posts, it genuinely feels like looking at the past.

I still remember the exact situation when I wrote my last post about Japanese and SQLite. That’s also the last time I ever had any serious side projects—mostly because I had too much free time and unemployed lol.

Speaking about that, I’m currently building something related to Japanese language learning and I’m planning on making it open source soon! I’ve been working on it for a while. Ok, back where we were about college.

Honestly, I didn’t plan to go to college initially because I don’t really feel the need to at the time. I think it’s just a waste of time because I can learn almost everything outside of college. Even when I went there, that fact still felt true—although, there are some things that I can’t really learn outside of college—did I regret any of it? Not at all!—At least, for the most part :p

Going to college changed me quite a bit, for the better or worse.

Character development arc, fr

Going to college has been a huge change for me. I feel like a completely different person from where I was 3 years ago. Of course I’m not going into the details about it—privacy reasons and whatnot, and no one would be interested on some random stranger’s life anyway :)

Now accepting friend requests IRL

The most notable change is probably the fact that I can now interact with people! That sounds so lame but it has been quite a big change for me. I used to be very anti-social and introverted—I really did, I actively avoid people and rarely make friends. I just wait to get picked up by some extroverts that resonate with me hahah.

Ever since I go to college, I’ve been trying my best to interact with people. Not the easiest task to do in the slightest when all you’ve been doing is avoiding people :)

I’m not exactly good at communication, and for that reason people always see me as rude, apathehic, unwelcoming, tone deaf, or anything along those lines—yeah, I know, it’s bad lol. I’m not the easiest person to get along with if you’re trying to make friends. A lot of the time, the things I said and how I act didn’t really match my intention—I am truly sorry if you’ve met me and felt that way. I tried, okay?

I don’t want to be a loner for the rest of my life. I want to get to know people and have some kind of connection with them, no matter how small it is. It’s actually nice to spend time with people you care about whether it’d be your friends, family, or partner.

だから、これからもよろしくね！

NPC to MC speedrun any% (still an NPC)

Since I was an introvert who avoided people, of course all I had was myself and no one else. I didn’t really care about myself. I mean, my lifestyle wasn’t exactly the healthiest. I literally couldn’t care less about my future, I just live day to day doing the things I enjoy.

I never had any self-confidence or self-esteem. I was always afraid of what people will think about me. I had no interest in dating at all. If you looked at me 2 years ago, you would definitely see some random teenager who doesn’t seem to have a future at all. I didn’t look good, not at all.

Unexpected things happened, I somehow managed to have a girlfriend when I went to college. Though we’re no longer together, but part of the reason why I care more about myself now is because after spending time with her, I realised there’s more to life—God, it sounds so cringe saying that hahahah let’s move on—and she was one of the reasons why I see things differently now.

I started going to the gym—it’s been a while actually, and I want to write something about it—I started eating healthier, I started taking care of my body—skincare and whatnot, you know the deal—dress somewhat better than I used to. It has been great! These little things changed me to be better.

Things college taught me (besides regret)

During the time I go there—I mean, I still do, but yeah I’m on a break right now—I learned a lot of things. I’m probably gonna miss a few things here, but here’s the big picture.

College W moments

It’s a pretty good environment for meeting people your age. You can easily interact with them, share some thoughts, have discussions about the things you mutually like, etc.

I actually think of going to college as a social thing. I no longer think that I go there to learn something, rather, I go there to meet with people, it’s a social activity. People are so diverse and interesting in their own unique way.

I don’t think I can get the social life that it gives me if I had to just stayed home doing remote work.

The L’s hit different

I barely have time to do anything because the amount of assignments that I had to constantly do was just… yeah. Most of them are pretty easy, it’s just so repetitive that I didn’t feel like I actually learned anything.

All I’ve been doing is self-studying and reading about things on my free time. I ended up using my time in class to work, it’s still a lot better than trying to pay attention to the course and ended up falling asleep because it was so boring :)

I mean, sure there are some things that caught my attention, but it happened so rarely. To be fair it’s my own fault for not choosing a top 1% university or something, but I mean, I didn’t intend to go in the first place so my expectation was zero lol

The plan, kinda

More yappuchino coming soon

There are a lot of things I want to do in the future! Starting from this post, I want to write more often like I used to—and actually publish it, not just letting it stay as a draft forever lol.

I’ve been writing a few on the side but didn’t really publish it because it wasn’t as polished (as if my posts are well polished hahahah, they’re mid at best). I want to shift from that and just make them more casual, as if I’m writing a tweet.

I want to write more about things I learned, things I’ve done, things that I found interesting, lots and lots of things! I’m not going to overthink about how it will turn out in the end because that’s what hinders me from writing more often.

One thing that keeps me from writing more often is that I treat my writing like it has to be perfect. While it is good to have that goal in mind, I don’t think that’s what I want to do here. I want to just have fun and share my thoughts with others.

From now on, I will write a bunch of posts about different things and not all of them will be technical! I’m still learning Japanese but I really want to try to write a full post in Japanese someday.

Time to expand my two brain cells

With the rise of LLM and AI being literally everywhere, new models are being released almost every week, I want to shift my focus from just being a web developer to something more low level. I’ve been CUDAmaxxing recently, exploring things that can ‘support’ the advancement of ML.

I’ve always wanted to do low level programming but I never really had the chance to do so because I was too focused on learning about the web since that’s the easiest path to put food on the table, at least that’s how it is where I live.

After I graduate and get my bachelor’s degree, I’m planning to pursue a master’s degree because I didn’t feel like I learned anything new and exciting for the past few years I was in college.

Getting rid of anime subtitles

I wrote this post after learning Japanese for a year, that was before I went to college. I didn’t get far since then unfortunately, mainly because I stopped learning Japanese after I got accepted. It’s a bit hard to split the time between college, work, and studying Japanese.

I mean, at one point I’m taking 4 different freelance jobs, layer that with a bunch of college assignments, also don’t forget the poor time management for the cherry on top. It wasn’t good—definitely not doing that again, but hey, the pay was good lol.

Recently I’ve been trying to pick it up again, I think it was at the start of this year. I have a goal to take 日本語能力試験 for N3 at the end of this year, so hopefully that can keep me motivated as opposed to just learning it on a whim.

I also want to try to take the MEXT scholarship after I graduate. I need to be at least N2 by that time, so yeah quite a few of strong reasons to learn this time. I’ve been practicing a lot, I joined a bunch of voice chat on Discord to practice my conversation skills, it’s been fun.

Break (and fix) other people’s code again

Ever since I went to college, I stopped doing OSS contributions because I was too busy. I want to get back into it because I really enjoy doing it, I don’t want to stop doing it, it was just that I didn’t have any time to do anything, really.

I’ve contributed a few to Neovim plugin ecosystem before, like Treesitter, LSP, Telescope, etc. It’s really nice because I get to be part of it and interact with a bunch of talented people. It taught me how to work with other people on a codebase, the entire process was really fun to do.

It’s been a long time ago though, I’ve forgotten already how it feels to contribute to one. It’s not going to be easy but I’m gonna have to start somewhere because I love doing open source :)

That was kinda fun

All in all, I’m glad everything went the way it was for me. I’ve had my fair share, the good part, the bad part, love ‘em all. I didn’t regret any of it, every moment is a learning experience. I’ve grown a lot, picked up new habits, dropped old ones, it’s been fun!

Aight, enough of me yapping. Until then, see you next time! 👋

A little note: No, this post is not AI generated just because you see some em-dashes (—) being used hahah. I’ve always liked using them even before LLM became mainstream. I knew someone who has a PhD and he uses em-dashes quite often, so I just picked up that habit.

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