A change of direction

People change. That’s a given.

I used to think OOP is boring. Now, I think it’s cool. I used to be scared of talking to people. Now, I’m not. I used to be a very ambitious competitive programmer. Now, I’m more excited to build stuff.

Inertia is the main reason it took me long enough to declare this. Moving on from the familiar stuff is kind of weird and scary, but the joy of learning new things overwhelms those concerns. The feeling had been decaying slowly but surely in the past year, anyways.

But some things stayed the same, even as the years go by. But that’s another story 😛 *bikin kepo*

Onward and upward!

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Awesome Summer!

Yeah yeah I know Indonesia doesn’t have ‘summer’. But it’s hot outside so I’ll just call it that.

So, my ~3 months long holiday just ended last week (Though I skipped all the classes this week but that’s another matter). Last year, I spent my 3 months with playing games, browsing the internet, etc. I regretted that summer very much. So I decided to do interesting stuffs this year, and I did!

  • Competitive programming: I’m still doing it and I don’t think I’ll ever stop in the foreseeable future. I am targeting for ICPC World Finals this year so yeah, I practiced most days and participated in CF rounds. Last week I solved 3 out of 4 problems that my team solved in Compfest’s preliminary round. (could’ve solved 4 or 5 though)
  • Real programming: I contributed to the open source world! Well I solved some small issue in TOCC and I become a maintainer of Regrader (thanks fushar!). It’s awesome how much I learned from such small contributions.
  • Campus duties: As some of you may already know, I am an IT Development staff at BEM Fasilkom UI, my faculty’s student union. I got assigned to design the members’ profile page and attendance list, and the media division’s poster-design ordering system. Cool stuff, learned a lot about front-end!
  • Summer job: I am coach for DKI Jakarta’s Informatics Olympiad team this summer! Learned a lot of stuff by teaching these nine kids and preparing problems for them with my awesome coach partner, Jessica. Totally worth it to spend almost all of August teaching them!
  • Internship search: I’ve always wanted to do an internship in an awesome company/start-up, so I did a lot of research this summer and gathered a list of awesome places to work and people to network with. I’ve already sent my applications to a few companies. So far so good.
  • Learning new stuff: Learning from past experience, I decided to only enroll in one Coursera course. And it went well! Almost done with my machine learning class, learned MATLAB for the programming exercises. I’ve also read some books on computer networking and Python and I’m also a lot more confident in my familiarity with the UNIX environment now. Woohoo!

When I heard the learn’d astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

It never occurred to me that studying CS in uni actually decreases the amount of time I spent coding per week. Perhaps it’s the way the lecturers teach me, the lack of worthy/challenging assignments, or the extremely weird reaction of my peers when I say I’d rather spend my time coding than do all those teen stuff.

But then again, when I skip those boring lectures I don’t go around and code. It’s like the magic is gone. All I’m left with is just a crippling thought in my head, saying “you’ve lost it.”

“I was on my way—jumping through hoops, kissing the proper behinds, attending to all the non-chemistry that one finds oneself occupied with. You know that world. That is not what I signed on for. I love the lab—because it’s all still magic, you know? Chemistry? I mean, once you lose that….”

I hope not.

Holiday Plans

Well, my ~3 months long holiday started last Tuesday, and I already made plans to fill the days!

Mid June – End of June

  • Campus duties: EPT BEM, Team Building PMB
  • IPSC!
  • Build PMB Website!!!
  • READ CTF writeups. Seriusly I suck hard at CTFs and I should study more.
  • Be fluent in Python. Do CF practices in Python.
  • READ Violent Python, Practical Packet Analysis, Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
  • Seriously, CTFs CTFs CTFs HackThisSite SmashTheStack
  • OMG STEAM SUMMER SALE! Spend wisely, Rakina.
  • Do CFs. 1 Round/Day.
  • Do SRMs. 1 SRM/Day.

July

  • Relearn the Piano, for real.
  • Finish the website!
  • Learn a human language. Top picks: German, Russian, Japanese.
  • Play the hell out of the games I bought on Steam Summer Sale
  • Don’t stop CTFing just because you’re starving.
  • Don’t stop CF & SRM just because you’re starving.
  • READING can make you forget about your stomach. READ THOSE BOOKS!!!!
  • YEAY MUDIK YEAY
  • Download ALL the movies using your brother’s fast fast internet connection. Gotta love the rich ones!

August

  • Teach the hell out of DKI Kids (Yes I got a job teaching them, yay money!)
  • Do the CF and SRM too, you don’t want to behind those kids……
  • Don’t forget to CTF, Gemastik is approaching………
  • Head start on statprob? 😀
  • ACE THE GEMASTIK QUALIFICATION ROUND!

Let’s just hope none of this ended up uncrossed 😀