Feedback Loop
I like creating stuff, always have. But I’ve never been able to make it work for me. It was always just for fun.
This is how I wanted to start this post. Until I realized it’s not true. It’s not a lie either. It just doesn’t mean anything. Kind of like “I like traveling”.
I’m just a dude who’s trying to find a way to live a good life, because I don’t believe there’s any meaning behind my existence apart from what I consider meaningful. Which is as simple as more joy and less suffering for me and for others I care about.
This is why I’m here, at the end of the second week of Fractal Tech bootcamp which is helping me become a software engineer. It’s a really intense 3-month, 60 hrs/week in-person program.
It’s hard. But I guess over the last year or so I developed a habit of making my life harder and harder in order to make it better. Within a few years, hopefully. I mean it is way better than it was but it’s a long way to go. Right now I’m in an extremely tough spot of balancing money (no work in parallel with the bootcamp) and time (just plain no time lol). At first I had just work and immigration-related stuff. Then I started preparing for the bootcamp while still working and found out I can’t fuck around anymore. And now I’m working/studying 60-70 hours a week, commuting for 2.5 hours a day and trying not to go insane in the meantime. I think I’m doing well though. I think I’ll manage. I think I have enough confidence and resilience and it won’t run out before I get a new source of it. I even started thinking of myselft as Buff Doge instead of Cheems haha.
The funny thing is that I built this relative confidence and agency just by doing my previous job. After I came to the US two years ago, I couldn’t be too picky. So I became a van driver moving used couches back and forth. I have to say I did a lot of stuff managing my time and communicating with people so I overcame a bunch of inner blockers during that time.
Today, I finally found some time for the bootcamp writing assignment. By the end of the second week. Yeah, it’s an assignment and I should have done it at the end of the first week and written something new this weekend. But oh well. I’ve been thinkting of starting a blog or something for a while, though, so we’ll see how it goes.
Anyway, here’s what I made so far. A Tic-Tac-Toe game, yay! There’s a lobby where you can create new games or open old ones, plus a game board. It stores everything in a database, so games are persistent. They even have unique and silly names! Proud of myself, man.
This week we made chatbots. My project was an MVP of my old idea for replacing static cards from Anki or any other spaced repetition app with chats where you can talk to a bot about the things you’re trying to remember. That’s supposed to make the process of revising those things active as opposed to traditional passive looking at them and assessing how well you remember them. It should be like a messenger but for ideas instead of people. Create a new chat, add an idea / thought / concept and after a while it’ll text you back with a question, a quick low-effort task, or some new relevant info. And then it’ll repeat that with a gradually decreasing frequency based on one of the spaced repetition algorithms. This MVP doesn’t have the algorithm though, it just shows the idea.
Next week’s assignment is a group project. That doesn’t sound comfortable at all to be honest. I have never been a fan of cooperation with others, but this is how it goes. This is how things are made. So I guess I’ve got a new blocker to break.