2021


Wow, it’s been a while, been super busy with college applications. Also yes, I’m aware it’s already past the New Year. I didn’t internalize that 2022 was around the corner until my feed started filling up with 2021 reflection posts. Let’s follow the crowd shall we?

## 2021 by the numbers

* 👨‍💻  3,448 commits in 47 different repositories

* ✉️ Posted 478 tweets (since May 2021)

* 🕝  Spent 706 hours in meetings

* 💵  Money spent on my desk setup: ♾️

* 💚  Spent another year with closest friends: Katherine, [Rohan Taneja](https://twitter.com/rtaneja_), [John Yang](https://twitter.com/jianangyang), [Matt Espinoza](https://twitter.com/MattEspoz), [Ellen Xu](https://twitter.com/EllenXu_), [Karan Dalal](https://twitter.com/karansdalal), [Maggie Guan](https://twitter.com/maggieguan149), [Nima Pourjafar](https://twitter.com/PourjafarNima), and [more](https://twitter.com/calixo888/status/1478077815639576578)

_Inspired by [Catherine Yeo](https://twitter.com/catherinehyeo)_

## Stages of 2021

Looking back, it’s crazy to see how my 2021 could be split up into different stages, each one with different activities, responsibilities, mindsets, and emotions. I experienced many highs and lows that I’ve never publicized, until now.

### Work, work, work

From before 2021 even started to May, I was just grinding. With [Hours](https://joinhours.com) being the only thing on my plate and mind, I was absolutely determined to turn it into something valuable. Starting the year with just under 1,000 users, I worked my butt off to get that number to 20,000 by the time May rolled around. [Fighting through so many technical issues](https://calix.dev/writing/bugs) and handling all parts of scaling a product alone, it all paid off eventually. Along the way, I had my first product press feature in [Morning Brew](https://www.morningbrew.com/sidekick/issues/2021/02/22) and had Hours go viral on social media.

### A new world of opportunity

Probably one of the most pivotal moments of my life: [Hours was acquired by Fiveable](https://calix.dev/writing/hours-acquired-by-fiveable). It not only came with a chunk of money in my pocket, but it suddenly gave me a ton of new responsibilities and opportunities.

For one, I joined Fiveable as a Lead Product Manager, leading Hours as a division of the company and managing my own team. My transition into my role was rocky, as we had to scramble to relaunch Hours with a new Fiveable-integrated brand in time for finals season, so I went without a proper onboarding plan.

Alongside joining Fiveable, I also worked with their PR team to help release press items regarding the acquisition. I had video interviews with various publications, appeared on various podcasts, and even had a team from CBS come to my house to [record a video for the local news station](https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/11/27/teenage-programmer-in-east-bay-creates-internet-study-buddy-platform-for-students/). It was certainly not the attention I was used to, but I have to admit, I kinda liked it.


!["In-home CBS Interview"](https://calix.dev/static/2021/cbs.jpeg)


I didn’t just accept the opportunities handed to me - I leveraged recent events to acquire new ones. I started posting (almost) daily on Twitter. I joined On Deck Catalyst’s 1st inaugural cohort after my friend [John Yang](https://twitter.com/jianangyang) healthily peer-pressured me into applying. I interned at Spero Ventures for 12 weeks, shadowing investors and learning about venture capital in edtech. I joined Uiflow to help with growth part-time, and got to experience a completely different startup culture and team dynamic than I ever have before.

With the new money I had in my pocket, I also started to learn how to appreciate money and use it wisely. Before, I would always save my money with no intention of spending a single dime when I didn’t need to. I matured, and understood the value in investing money into tools and services that would make me more productive. I became more generous in giving to others, and more generous to myself, mindfully treating myself to gifts and gadgets that I had wanted for a while.

### Lost

I was on top of the world after the acquisition. Everyone always asks questions about the acquisition: What were the terms? How long did it take? What was the process? But, no one ever asks what life was like after the acquisition.

I was on top of the world, for about 2-3 weeks. Shortly after, everything came to a stand still. The press was mostly finished, and suddenly I was wondering what would be next. I certainly had responsibilities to keep me busy, but it seemed so tame compared to what had been happening in the earlier months.

I started to panic. I started building [Typesite](https://typesite.co) and [Sera](https://textsera.com), which both came out as failed projects. I had wanted to build those projects for a long time, but I had the wrong mindset going in - it was more about satisfying my desire for excitement instead of actually being passionate about the mission. While everyone was congratulating me on the acquisition, I slowly spiraled into a state of confusion and unconfidence, with days filled with endless scrolling on social media. 

I was slowly being destroyed by my own expectations of myself, let alone the expectations that others had for me.

### Transformation

I was wandering around, lost, for weeks on end. At some point, I had to pinch myself and face reality. I can’t go back to who I was: a crazy, ambitious startup founder and builder; at least not right now. I was in a different phase of life, and whether I liked it or not, I had to adapt to my situation.

My first issue was that I had way too much time on my hands, and I needed to fill it with something productive. I picked up my old blog and started writing again. Instead of writing about educational/entrepreneurial topics, I just wrote about my life: stories I wanted to tell, thoughts I had, lessons I’ve learned. I began bullet journaling daily, documenting everything that happened that day so I could look back on it in the future. With COVID calming down a little, I resumed volunteering at my church, running camerawork during worship and sermons. It felt weird to me because I never considered these things to be productive because it wasn’t directly impacting my career.

The other issue I had was that I wasn’t embracing my experiences at Fiveable and Uiflow to truly learn. I initially joined with the excitement that I would learn new skills on the job, but I wasn’t putting in any effort to make that come true. A key reason I joined Fiveable was to learn about product, and so I started taking product management courses, started reading product-related articles, got in contact with potential mentors, and applied everything I learned within my job. I took advantage of the coworkers I was surrounded with and learned as much as I could from them. I picked our designers’ brains about UI/UX design principles and took any opportunity I could to learn from engineers about things like scalability and security.

### Work-work balance

It didn’t come quickly, but after 1-2 months of a new productive way to fill my time, my mental health was back up. I felt like I was improving in a career sense, but also my mindset was shifting in a way it never has before. I placed more emphasis on enjoyment within my personal life with family and friends, and placed less emphasis on what I did for work, even though it took up the majority of my day. This ironically boosted my work productivity day over day.

Slowly, I started to figure my life out. I started to really embrace my role as a PM at Fiveable, shifting towards working with leadership and department leads to conduct higher-level work instead of continually being deep in the nitty-gritty of product. I shifted my line of work at Uiflow from helping with customer onboarding to actually building apps in Uiflow. I built a [Product Hunt clone](https://producthunt-main.uiflow.live/) and the [newly-designed Uiflow landing page](https://uiflow.com) in full no-code, and had it pitched to the founders of Freshworks, DataDog, Automattic, and Wordpress. I even got to demo my Product Hunt clone to the CEO of [NoCodeDevs](https://nocodedevs.com), and he said: “This is hands-down the best Product Hunt clone I’ve ever seen.” I even got to make my first angel investment - not a startup, but a water resources cleaning plant planning to IPO in Q2 of this year.

Beyond that, I took up a side project inspired by my bullet journaling: [Recollect](https://myrecollect.com/). After the acquisition, I started to really realize how important smaller moments are. I started to realize that what matters the most in life doesn’t always make the headlines - it’s the moments we miss with our family and friends. Recollect represents a real-world application of my appreciation of my memories, and is one of the most passion-centric projects I’ve ever built. I started with building it as a web app, but decided to extend my comfort zone and built my first ever mobile app, which was recently [released on the App Store](https://myrecollect.com/ios) in December. 

### Turning a new chapter

Soon enough after achieving work-work balance, new opportunities started to open up for me. At Fiveable, I was lucky enough to be part of our decision to make Hours the core platform and vision for the company, allowing me to join our leadership team as Head of Special Projects. I joined On Deck Edtech’s 2nd cohort beginning in January, already having met so many amazing people before the fellowship even started. I was lucky enough to travel all over the place as well. I traveled to Michigan for Fiveable’s first company retreat for five days, with it also being my first time flying alone. I traveled to Wisconsin for Fiveable’s leadership retreat, being part of the decision-making process for our new company direction. Finally, I traveled to Florida to spend time with my family, relax and unwind, and also to attend a real-estate business conference and be a speaker.

!["Family + Fiveable collage"](https://calix.dev/static/2021/first.png)

I also became closer with those within my geographical community. I became good friends with many at UC Berkeley and others coming from all over the US. It was refreshing to be warmly welcomed into a supportive friend group full of amazing young people, and on the occasions we met up, they were some of the best times of my life.

!["Friends in SF"](https://calix.dev/static/2021/sf-group.png)

## Reflection

2021 was truly a life-changing rollercoaster, and one of the best years of my life. Though many people say that, I really mean it. At the beginning of 2021, I was just an avid programmer with no idea what the future held. Now, I don’t just feel matured career-wise, but I also feel more experienced as a human being. I’m more in touch with my feelings, my limits, my triggers.

Unlike others, I don’t have any specific goals or resolutions. If you asked me to make goals at the beginning of 2021, they would be completely different from what I actually accomplished that year. I’ve become more of an advocate with _going with the flow_. I don’t have to know what I’m doing or where I’m going, and to be honest, I don’t right now. The future always remains a mystery, and I’ll flow with whatever comes up while I’m still young.

Though I sound confident and put-together, I’m pretty scared for 2022. There’s always an individual and societal pressure to try to make sure the next year is always better than the previous. From time-to-time, I have fears that 2021 would be a highlight in comparison to the upcoming years. 

Despite all of that, I’m determined to succeed in 2022 in my own unique way. Past that, I’m so blessed for everything that I have. My family, my friends, my career, my **relationships** - they’re all beyond amazing. My parting words: thank you to everyone who’s been a part of my journey thus far, and let’s make 2022 an amazing year!

2022

 

Hello! Back with my 2nd-ever yearly reflection. Times like these make me really grateful that I started doing these yearly reflections last year, even if it’s a big to-do item that lingers for a few days. Even though I’ve published reflection blog posts almost every month this year, I wasn’t able to publish everything that was happening in my life at the time. Reflecting on this past year, it’s been exciting to see everything that I’ve done holistically.

-----

### Out with high school
I started off 2022 with finishing high school early and making my transition towards university. I ended up finishing my last semester of high school early, finishing all my classes by January and graduating in March. 

I also spent my time submitting my last few applications, doing my college interviews, and waiting for my decisions. Overall, I applied to 28 schools, rejected by 21 schools, waitlisted by 3, and accepted to 4 schools. I made my final decision to commit to USC!

### Work changes
In the first 8 months of 2022, I was pretty much working full-time across a few different companies.

At Fiveable, we had finally finished the merge of Fiveable and Hours, so I newly joined the leadership board as Head of Special Projects, and later initialized and led a new department called Labs to facilitate early product experiments. Got to spend some time in San Jose for a leadership retreat.

!["Work changes"](https://calix.dev/static/2022/1.png)

In other news, I continued and finished my internship at Uiflow (YC W21). I was super appreciative of the mentorship and experience I had there. I also did a bit of research and engineering at Cornell’s Future of Learning Lab. And right before the start of summer, I was recruited early to be a Venture Partner at Contrary, operating on USC’s campus. Throughout the summer, I was recruited to do a bit of SWE at both Beacons.ai (a16z, YC) and Kinetic on recommendation from a good friend Kyler. I was also officially named an Atlas Fellow in early June!

### Final moments of fun
Senior spring and summer were filled with some of my most memorable moments.

First, I attended both high school prom and grad night. Being homeschooled since 6th grade, I never thought I’d have the opportunity to do either. It was sort of surreal to be there to say the least.

I took two trips down to LA, one for USC’s visit weekend and the other for my cousin’s graduation at LMU. I visited Las Vegas for a business conference, spent some time in Hawaii for a family vacation, and I also spent a few days in the middle of the woods for Contrary’s annual retreat. It was super cool to meet all the other venture partners, fellows, alumni, as well as a few familiar faces. 

!["Final moments of fun"](https://calix.dev/static/2022/2.png)

I flew down to San Diego to attend the 1517 Summit and spent a few fun days with friends (s/o Nima, Billy, and Kevin for being awesome roommates). I spent two weeks in Berkeley for the Atlas Fellowship program with some of the smartest kids I’ve ever met. And on the topic of Berkeley, I spent a scattered amount of time on UC Berkeley throughout the winter and spring. Shoutout to the homies Rohan, Tushar, Marina, Ian, Gurvir, etc. 😎

!["Final moments of fun"](https://calix.dev/static/2022/3.png)

So, so grateful to the people who made those trips possible and so memorable.

### First semester of college
As the summer came to a close, I toned down the travel and stayed home to spend my last few weeks with my family and girlfriend. I left my jobs at Fiveable, Beacons.ai, and Kinetic all on the same day and drove down to LA the day after.

Spent some time with my family before finally moving into my dorm, unpacking my things, and saying bye to my parents for a long time. I made new friends with my roommate and everyone on my dorm floor, and got to spend a lot of time with them throughout orientation week. Started my first week of classes at IYA and got to know the other 41 members in my cohort.

Throughout the semester, I did a lot. I went to Palm Springs for a club retreat, Joshua tree for an IYA class retreat, and NYC for a Contrary Venture Partner retreat. Went to a handful of startup events around LA and hosted my first event for founders and VCs at USC! Co-hosted and co-sponsored a few events on-campus on behalf of Contrary, attended the SC Blockchain Conference hosted by USC Marshall and Blockchain@USC, and immersed myself into the startup culture around USC and LA.

!["First semester of college"](https://calix.dev/static/2022/4.png)

Finally, I ended the semester by spending Thanksgiving break with my family, and finishing up my finals season early. I competed in a pitch competition on-campus and won first place, cashing in a nice $1k check. Capped off the semester with my 18th birthday and a final club banquet reflecting on the semester.

!["First semester of college"](https://calix.dev/static/2022/5.png)

-----

## Reflection

I know I said this last year, but 2022 was definitely one of the best years of my life. 2022 was a year full of personal growth and opportunity. I finished high school, started college, and started living independently. I immersed myself into a new environment, adapted to it, and now I consider it my second home. Through all the highs and lows of 2022, I feel that I’ve come out the other end as a more mature, experienced, and eager person.

Like last year, I don’t have clear goals for 2023. Because to be honest, I have no idea what it’s going to be like. In my life so far, I’ve found that things can change quickly and dramatically, in ways that I could never expect or predict. So rather than setting goals for myself, I want to hold myself to a set of standards to maintain and exceed at all moments throughout this next year. As long as I can ensure that I’m constantly learning, adapting, and working hard, I can accomplish a lot more than any goal I decide to set now.

Finally, thank you to everyone who made 2022 an amazing year. Thanks to my friends at UC Berkeley for sharing your college experience with me before I had my own, and being a core reason why I’m at USC today. Thanks to my friends at USC for making my first semester so magical and memorable. Thanks to my friends in the tech & startup scene that continue to inspire me every day. And thank you to my family, who continue to support me in everything that I do.

I’m truly excited to make 2023 the best year ever.


2023

 

Hello! I’m back for another yearly reflection. This year, I decided not to do public monthly reflections, so I felt like this year I didn’t do that much reflecting. It’s always nice to take a step back and see all that has happened in the past year.

### YC + leaving school

2023 started off on an exciting note. My co-founder and I had a YC interview scheduled for January 5, that we had been prepping for since the end of 2022. I flew down from the bay to LA early to take it with my co-founder, and after many hours of prepping and waiting for a result, we were accepted into the W23 batch! Words can’t describe the excitement that we felt at the moment, and it was shortly after overtaken by a feeling of panic to get stuff done. Both the W23 batch and the second semester of my freshman year in college started 4 days after our acceptance, and I was still an enrolled student in LA when I needed to be full-time in SF.

I spent my first week of school submitting a leave of absence, canceling my housing, canceling my meal plan, and finding a place to live in SF. And by the end of the week, I had packed up all my things, said bye to my friends, and was on the road. It was bittersweet — I was really disappointed to be missing my second semester and leaving all the friends I had made from my first semester, but I was also excited for everything to come.

![Leaving USC](https://calix.dev/static/2023/1.png)

Getting into YC came with a caveat — we had to pivot. There were a handful of issues with the idea we applied with, and so we began the batch with a small market pivot. That small pivot was the first of many pivots we made over the next few months. Being in YC was still an amazing experience — I had done YC Startup School and watched all the YC videos when I was younger, and meeting all of the founders and partners I had watched years ago was surreal.

![YC](https://calix.dev/static/2023/2.png)

My months living in SF while being in YC were some of the hardest months I’d had in my life. Every day was a 12+ hour work day filled with a mixture of exhaustion, uncertainty, and stress, all with the doubt of “Did I make the right decision to leave school?” I had no social life and no work-life balance — living in SF meant I was close to my family, but I barely had time to visit them.

By the end of the batch, I realized that I wasn't at a point in my life to continue being a full-time founder. It was an honor and a dream come true to be a YC founder, but I had a gut feeling that this wasn't the right time. There's much time to start a company when I'm older, but not as much time to be young and in college.

I ended up making the extremely hard decision to leave my company. Now, my co-founder is pursuing a new idea in the e-commerce space, and I’m super excited about where he and his team are going.

### Moving to NYC

While living in SF, I spent a few weekends traveling down to LA to visit my friends at USC. I spent a lot of time with friends in LA and USC, and at some point, my friend Kyler and I randomly thought, "Wouldn't it be sick if we moved to NYC?" We miraculously found a fairly priced apartment in Manhattan and decided to move to the city together in May.

![NYC](https://calix.dev/static/2023/3.png)

What did I do in NYC? I didn’t really have a plan. A lot of people (like a lot) asked me why I moved to NYC, but I never had a reason. I figured I would live in NYC at some point, so why not now? After leaving my company, I wanted to lean more into generative AI, so I spent every single day working on a handful of projects in AI. I worked on [Dream](https://usedream.app) (an AI no-code tool for functional web apps), [AirDiligence](https://airdiligence.com) (legal AI tooling for real estate), [Avery](https://meetavery.com) (AI executive assistant), and a bunch of other projects.

My days were unstructured, I was working over 12+ hours a day and barely made any time for myself. Luckily I found a community at [Verci](https://verci.com), but even with that, I burnt myself out. By the end of my stay, I was more than ready to go home and be with my family. After spending day after day working on projects and trying to get traction on them, I was burnt out and ready to go back to school.

### Back to school

One of the biggest reasons I left my company was to go back to school. After I had signed away my position and ownership, I had a lot of doubts about if I had made the right decision. During my first week back at school, all those doubts melted away. Back with my friends that I had missed so much reminded me that this is where I wanted to be.

I worked less and enjoyed school more. I dropped a lot of the projects I worked on over the summer and re-ignited my friendships from the first semester. I joined the USC club tennis team, did a hacker residency with LangChain, did some contract work at Whatnot, and invested more time meeting people on campus. I decided that if I wouldn't be a founder, I wanted to join a company I believed in.

One of the best decisions I made this past semester was to lead one of USC’s startup incubators. In my first semester, I participated in a startup incubator called [SEP](https://uscsep.com), and in the summer I was asked by the leadership to lead it this semester. I had my reservations, but I decided to take the role. I recruited my team and we worked hard over the summer and the semester to redesign the curriculum, recruit our members, and support them as they created their startups.

![SEP](https://calix.dev/static/2023/4.png)


Many people questioned why I was spending my time doing this, given that it wasn’t very beneficial for me. But, leading the incubator ended up being one of the most fulfilling things I’d ever done. My team and I worked many hours to support the teams we were incubating, staying up long past midnight multiple times a week to help them with their products, designs, and pitches. We taught them the basics of startups, helped them form teams, build their products, and finally pitched it at our demo day. I truly felt like a proud dad. My friend Mandika wrote a great post about it, [check it out](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/running-collegiate-product-incubator-all-nighters-getting-swartz-4uuvc%3FtrackingId=TNqbZB77RrmNKryoTDlAOw%253D%253D/).

I spent finals week in Hawaii with my family (the best way to spend finals week). Took a road trip to Portland to spend time with friends and a road trip back down to LA for Christmas and the holidays, pretty much going up and down the entire West Coast. To finish off 2023, I ended with a nice case of COVID.

### Wrapping it up

2023 felt like a blur. I can still remember the thought of “Wow, it’s 2023 already” like it was yesterday, and now it’s about to be 2024. A few weeks ago, a friend asked me to reflect on 2023. To be transparent, I didn't have much good to say. This year felt like one of the hardest I'd had in my entire life. I felt like I failed and struggled a lot more than I succeeded.

I think the best thing that happened this year is I gained perspective on how much less important my work is in comparison to my family, my friendships, the college experience, and the memories that you can only make being 18 years old. I feel more confident and comfortable making sacrifices in my professional life to make the most of my personal life, and I believe it’s for the better. Nonetheless, I'm grateful for every experience I had this year.

Thank you to everyone who made my year so much better and brighter! My family for always supporting me, my friends at USC and IYA for making school as fun as it is, and my friends who have been there since high school (Kyler, John, Nima). My co-founder Calvin for being a great collaborator, supporter, and friend, our YC partners who had been patient and guided us through our pivots, and the handful of YC friends who made our struggles relatable and bearable. Finally, my friends Mandika and Andrew for leading SEP with me this year and all of the SEP students we mentored (Tau class shoutout!).

I hope everyone had a great year and I'm looking forward to all of the success that’s to come in the new year!

7 Tech Nonprofits that are Changing the World


Throughout the past decade, innovators have been finding more and more new ways to address tech-related needs across the world, causing the quantity of tech nonprofits to skyrocket. According to the founder of Fast Forward, a nonprofit accelerator in the Bay Area, the number of new tech nonprofits is increasing by over 30% every year.

Similar to tech startups, nonprofits are able to take advantage of the constantly evolving world of technology. Cloud computing, omnipresent mobile devices, and social media, just to name a few factors, make it incredibly easy for organizations to benefit the world through tech. There are countless amazing tech nonprofits, but here are just a few that you should know about.

[**Guardian Project**](https://guardianproject.info/)
Despite the revolutionary advancement accompanying smartphones, many issues arise, including decreased security and privacy. Guardian Project actively combats this problem by developing secure apps and open-source software libraries that are convenient to use, regardless of where you’re from or who you are. As mobile communication advances and becomes less secure, Guardian Project aims to safeguard users and their privacy.

[**Center for Democracy and Technology**](https://cdt.org/)
Technology policies have a significant impact on the ways we interact with the digital world. The Center for Democracy and Technology strives to promote democratic values and ensure that laws are encouraging people to use technology for the betterment of the world. They aim to decrease government censorship and surveillance while simultaneously protecting the rights and privacy of citizens. In the midst of a digital revolution, it’s easy to lose sight of individual rights, but it’s crucial to protect them in order to use technology ethically.

[**KoBo Toolbox**](https://www.kobotoolbox.org/#home)
The most critical aspect of saving lives after humanitarian crises such as hurricanes and typhoons is to collect reliable information. However, understanding the needs of the population is often neglected due to the need to quickly gather and analyze this information. KoBo Toolbox works on developing an open-source suite of data collection tools that address this issue. Their software is entirely free and is typically used by professionals addressing crises and researchers in developing countries. With the software that KoBo Toolbox provides, it’s possible to collect crucial data safely, quickly, and ethically.

[**One Laptop Per Child**](http://one.laptop.org/)
Technology is developing faster than ever, and with this comes the ubiquity of computers and the importance of learning how to use them. However, many children around the world don’t have access to computers and are therefore unable to explore the endless possibilities of digital technology. One Laptop Per Child attempts to remedy this by producing low-cost, powerful, and ecological laptops for underprivileged children living in less affluent communities. By opening infinite doors for countless children, One Laptop Per Child works toward a more advanced and equitable future.

[**NPower**](https://www.npower.org/)
In the present day, over 70% of jobs require some sort of digital or technological skill, but the job market has fallen behind. Out of the 6 million jobs that require technological prowess, only 3.2 million people are equipped with the skills necessary for them. NPower focuses on training military veterans and young adults so that they can succeed in the digital economy. They envision a future in which gender, race, and socioeconomic status don’t hold people back from pursuing prosperous careers.

[**Code.org**](https://code.org/)
The vast majority of students who go through the K-12 public education system take a set of common STEM subjects, such as algebra, chemistry, and biology. However, despite the exponential advancement of technology in recent years, many students don’t have the opportunity to study computer science before college. Code.org aims to make computer science part of the core K-12 curriculum so that students are better equipped for their future in such a tech-dominated society. So far, they’ve impacted tens of millions of students and teachers with their programs.

[**Girls Who Code**](https://girlswhocode.com/)
In 1995, 37% of engineers were females. Since then, this number has dropped to an astounding 24%, and will continue to decline unless drastic changes are made. Similar to Code.org, Girls Who Code aims to increase students’ access to coding-related opportunities, particularly girls and other underrepresented minorities. By influencing girls ages 13-17, Girls Who Code aims to expose girls to the world of programming while they’re still young and change the image of what a programmer is, thereby closing the gender gap.

----

Looking at all these amazing missions, it’s clear that rapidly advancing technology can be used for so much more than starting enormous corporations and making billions of dollars. With tech becoming so prevalent in the modern day, it’s crucial that we use it not just to convenience ourselves, but also to better society.

Written by Katie Li, edited by by me.


April 2022

 

[April 2022 photo dump](https://app.myrecollect.com/memory/626edae154d3bc00163e1ae9)

------------------

Welcome back to my life! This past month has felt very monumental, just like in March. My time in April was filled with many milestones and long-awaited experiences. Whenever anyone’s been asking me what I’ve been up to, I just respond, “I’ve just been doing high school things.”

Despite all these amazing experiences, April felt extremely short and short-lived. I’ll explain later…

At the very start of the month, I attended prom. I attended a different school’s prom, where I barely knew anyone other than my girlfriend. Even though the actual event started at 6pm, we were busy taking photos and driving around for 8 hours beforehand. It was held at the San Jose Civic Center, a way too extravagant venue to hold a high school prom, but the tickets were $200 each so I wasn’t complaining.

Everything about it was perfect. The dancing, the music, the people I met, the moments that were captured. It was such a surreal experience, not just because it was so fun, but because I never thought I’d be able to experience something like that. Back when I was still a freshman, I had already been homeschooled for 4 years, and I was feeling extremely lonely. I knew that committing to this path meant that I would miss out on a lot: friends, parties, and those special events like prom. Fast-forward to today, and I finally got to collect those memories that I never thought I’d have.

Later that week, I embarked on a trip to USC. On the first day, I attended an IYA-specific event where I met most of my ~30 other cohort members, toured the building, talked with faculty, got a glimpse into the classes, etc. I can still remember walking up the main staircase with the words “The Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy” engraved on it - probably the most epic stairs I’ve ever walked on. Everything about it just made me fall in love with the school even more. I knew better and better that it was the place I wanted to spend the next phase of my life.

The day after, I attended the admitted students day for all USC admits. It was much larger with about ~5000 attendees. What was funny was we were instructed to break into groups for the schools we were attending, so we hung out as the IYA again for the second day. I got to spend more time touring the campus, meeting current students, and just realizing how beautiful the campus itself was. I was super sad to leave, but I knew I would be back again soon. Right when I got home, I submitted my official commitment to USC.

I also got to spend another weekend at UC Berkeley again this month. More the same, and yet every time I visit it’s a new experience. I did everything I possibly could. I lounged around the dorm and I explored more of campus. I saw sunsets from the city and I saw sunsets from the roof. I caught up with old friends and I made new friends. I indulged in dining hall food and I tried new restaurants. With the semester coming to a close for many students, it may have been my last visit for the next few months.

Another milestone: I graduated high school. Yes, my graduation ceremony will be in mid-June, but I officially finished all my classes, received my final transcripts, and closed out my high school journey. It was weird to think that I’m currently not a student, and I won’t be for another few months. Right from the beginning to end, high school was a period of my life where I had the most growth, personally and career-wise. I’ll forever remember these years.

So, why did this month feel short? Welp, I’ve been sick for the past two weeks. Right after I came back from Berkeley, I started feeling sick. Two COVID tests showed I was negative, but I was still forced to stay home and only go outside in secluded areas. I couldn’t celebrate my graduation because I was illl, and I felt hindered from doing a lot of things I wanted to do before college like meeting up with friends and exploring new places. Though I’m luckily recovering, I’m still sick as I write this. I honestly didn’t expect to be sick for this long.

While being sick, I couldn’t really do much to cope. It was hard to go places, focus on work, or have the energy to do much of anything. At some point, my thoughts started to take over, and I needed to get out of the house. I started going on walks and skateboard rides, and I let spontaneity lead the way. One time, I was just skateboarding around my area when I saw a hiking trail entrance and thought, “It’s almost sunset. What if I just hiked to the top of this hill?”. Another time, I discovered a newly-constructed neighborhood of mansions on the top of an extremely steep, dangerous hill. Did I decide to hike to the very top even though I was sick? Yes. Did I almost slip and fall several times? Absolutely. Did I slow down my recovery by unintentionally exercising so much? Probably. But, I don’t regret it a single bit.

--------------------

Overall, this month didn’t feel like a month, rather it felt like half. While reflecting, I realized that I didn’t create as many memories as I had hoped for April. It was disappointing since that’s the whole reason why I write daily and monthly reflections like these.

Despite that, for the half that felt real, it held some of the best moments of my life. Whether I spent it with family, friends, or alone in my bedroom, it was all worth it in my book.


Atlas Fellowship

 

In May, I was accepted into the [Atlas Fellowship](https://www.atlasfellowship.org/) as an Atlas Fellow. Earlier in July, I attended their summer program in Berkeley for 11 days. It was, without a doubt, the best summer program I’ve ever attended and one of the best experiences ever.

-----

When I arrived at the Atlas venue, I had no idea what to expect. Being semi-experienced with the UC Berkeley campus and its surrounding area, when I saw the address of the program venue, I assumed that we were going to be housed inside of an apartment complex. Made sense to me.

I arrived, and I thought to myself, “This doesn’t look like an apartment complex.” My parents and I walked into a huge house with people huddled around whiteboards, fancy furniture laying around, and golden light everywhere. It turned out to be an old sorority house that they had rented, renovated, and were planning to purchase later that year. It was named Atlantis. I took my entrance COVID test, was warmly greeted, and was then escorted to my room.

Along with knowing nothing about the venue, I also didn’t know anything about the other fellows that I would be living with. No clue even how many people would be there. I wanted to start meeting everyone as soon as I could. I walked into the bathroom, met my first fellow,, and headed downstairs together to meet the instructors and explore.

Each room in the house had a special name, with a cheeky definition. We walked into the main room, called the Schelling Room, named after the [Schelling point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)) in game theory. Students were huddled around whiteboards writing down all sorts of statistics equations. We were apparently too late to join in on the activity, so we were introduced by two instructors to chat, which later turned into a full group conversation as people started to arrive.

This was my first wake-up call. In my day-to-day work, I was used to having conversations in my realm of expertise, and understanding the ins and outs of what was being discussed. This was not the same. We started with a “simple” conversation about the mathematical and physical meaning of “temperature”, and a theory of how two points on opposite ends of the world could always equal the same relative temperature. In this group of 10 people, all of which were aged between 16-18 years old, everyone grasped the concepts being thrown around like it was second nature. Except… me. Everyone was inclusive and wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page. But as they continually checked the group to make sure everyone understood, I was constantly the odd one out, making it clear that I didn’t understand the conversation. As they iteratively dumbed-down various concepts, it was extremely humbling to finally be the “dumbest” in the room.

We moved on. The whole group took a tour of Atlantis, which was beautiful. Each room was specially designed to limit blue light, block out distractions and noise, and create an inviting environment to focus and learn. Each room was filled with golden light and little trinkets for people to fidget and play with. Soft carpet stretched the floors of each room, water and drinks were available everywhere, and snack cabins were littered across the house for consumption 24/7. It was such a perfect environment.

We headed off back to Schelling for the opening session of Atlas Session 2, and again my expectations were not met with reality. We went through an overview of the program, what to expect, and the core values each member was encouraged to hold throughout the next week and a half. Information was presented in such a neutral manner, allowing anyone to interpret and accept it however they chose. Students were encouraged to have their own opinions, and challenge instructors on their beliefs. We were taught to not follow the default, have our own beliefs, be open to new ones, and take agency over learnings and opportunities to make the most of our 11 days. Instructors pushed us to limit our connection to the outside world, i.e putting our phones down, to create space for us to ponder new ideas, have deep conversations with others, and not become distracted by the outside world.

We ended our first day by getting to know one another, and I quickly learned that every person there was extraordinary. The instructors came from world-class backgrounds in AI research, quantitative trading, entrepreneurial ventures, etc. The fellows were all amazing in their own ways. One was an international speech and debate champion. Another held a Guinness World Record for the youngest person to achieve nuclear fusion. A few ranked top 50 in the world in high school mathematical ability. Some ran global nonprofits, others were ISEF champions. Some did biomedical research, others built consumer startups. I truly learned something from each person I spoke with.

As the program continued, each day was packed. I would wake up with ~5 hours of sleep, rush to get a few minutes of work in, and head downstairs to start my first class. Classes would run from morning to evening, with space for meals, active activities, and challenges. Each break and meal was spent talking with fellows and instructors, with no space for alone time. Activities after hours would be spent playing ping pong, singing karaoke, or playing board games until far after midnight, hence why I averaged such little sleep each night. It was intense but awesome.

A big part of the program was betting. At the beginning of the program, we were introduced to the program’s official currency system: clips. Each clip was worth about 10 cents, and the clips economy was promised to not fall victim to inflation - each clip would always be worth 10 cents. We were encouraged to gain as many clips as we could throughout the next 11 days through challenges, competitions, but also betting. I never really liked betting, since I was raised to view it as gambling. So when I saw fellows making bets with each other and even with instructors, I was shocked. Everyone kept encouraging me to make bets, and after a few days, I finally decided to make a bet. I bet 5 clips on a chess game, and exactly what I thought would happen happened. My focus narrowed, my hands became sweaty, and concentrated even harder to win the game. The stakes were raised, even if it were only by 50 cents. I lost the game, and my clips, but only after I realized what happened. Yes, betting raises the stakes of any situation, but that’s exactly the point. It’s the declaration of your belief that you are smarter or better than someone else, and putting your money where your mouth is. Though I would never bet regularly with actual money, the value of betting is much more apparent to me now.

Every few days, the instructors would hold a challenge for us. When I first started, I couldn’t tell if these were physical challenges, mental challenges, or something else. For the first challenge, we were given an altitude watch and $200. Our goal was to get it high up in the air in the next 90 minutes and get it back to Atlantis safely. The team with the highest altitude would be awarded clips. We were split into groups of 5 with 1 instructor to chaperone each team. When the challenge started, my mind immediately thought, “Oh, so this is a throwing challenge?” Like, who can throw this watch the highest right? But as I went to talk to my team, someone ran past me asking, “Who knows how to build a rocket?” I then realized, wow I’m definitely not on the same page. This isn’t a throwing competition, it’s a creative challenge. My team ended up running around to find balloons, climb a mountain, and let our watch float to success, but I guess we didn’t realize how heavy the watch was - it didn’t get off the ground. 

My second favorite challenge was the cake challenge. The instructors presented us with a cake to replicate in 90mins. It was a vegan chocolate cake with some sort of coffee icing. Seemed simple enough. But wait, there’s more. We were given the ingredients **unlabelled** in Ziploc bags and without a recipe. We didn’t know what the ingredients were, which ones we needed, or in what order we needed to mix and bake them. There was a shop where you could purchase things like a recipe, ingredients list, and extra amounts of ingredients for clips, our in-program currency system. Finally, there were 3 prediction markets: if a selected 5 (out of 7) teams were going to win, if the staff was going to profit off of this challenge, and how much profit the winning team would have. Though this could’ve been viewed as a cake baking challenge, which it was, winning isn’t always the end goal. The end goal was to make as many clips as possible. So, some teams went off to bake the best cake possible. But others… didn’t. Almost half of all the participants were huddled around the prediction markets, making bets to win their team clips without cooking a single thing. Half of my team was working on these prediction markets, while the other half focused on baking a cake. As we continued to fall behind, being confused with the ingredients and not understanding how to bake a cake, the rest of our team stopped us. “Don’t bake anymore!” I was confused. Why? This was a baking challenge. My teammate explained to me that he had made a huge bet… against our team. What? “I bet against our team. So, as long as we don’t win this challenge, we’ll make more clips than if we actually won.” I realized, this didn’t have to be a baking challenge unless you wanted it to. It was unfair to expect everyone to bake when others had more experience. But, anyone can make an educated bet. We dropped our equipment and spent our time talking with other teams, figuring out which had the best chance of winning, and betting on them. In the end, my team profited heavily, along with many other teams.

Many challenges and activities within Atlas were formatted to look like a competition, but it was actually about collaboration. In almost all the challenges, it rewarded the best team for the best performance. But they provided many opportunities for the competitors to lose clips to the staff in exchange for advantages to beat the other teams. Noble fellows noticed this and herded all of us together each time to figure out how fellows could collectively make a higher profit rather than losing our clips to the staff. Many challenges became less about competition and more about collaboration.

-----

Being an Atlas Fellow has been such an honorable and amazing experience, and being a part of the program was an extremely transformative experience. I wouldn’t say it altered my life vision or mission, but being immersed in such a diverse environment like Atlantis was eye-opening. Not just with the amazing people I met, but with the skills I learned, perspectives I adopted, and belief systems I considered. Atlas properly introduced me to the world of effective altruism, and though I’m not sure if it’s an area I’d spend my career in, I’m glad to have been educated in such an amazing way.


August 2022

 

[August 2022 photo dump](https://photos.app.goo.gl/M2b3AMrU72Qig2sZ9)

-----

Hello from LA! It’s weird that I’m not living in the Bay Area anymore. But, more on that later.

August has been quite a month for me, and certainly the biggest transition I’ve ever taken in my life. My family has only moved once, with my old house only being a short 15min drive away. Now, I’m on the opposite end of California. Big change if you ask me.

-----

In my last two weeks at home before leaving for USC, I prioritized time with my family and girlfriend. Time at home suddenly felt so fleeting, and I was desperate to savor and capture every second of it. I became nostalgic often - even though I would be visiting home every couple of months, I knew that once I left, there was a low chance I’d return to my old life. Sure, maybe I’d live at home for a bit at a time, but more than likely I’d be living in a different city, in a different house, with different people around me. Leaving behind my home and my loved ones hit me hard each time I thought about it.

As college approached, I also became more and more anxious. What if I didn’t like it there? What if I couldn’t find friends I liked? What if college wasn’t for me? Creating and maintaining proper habits, schedules, and routines was more important than ever in such a fast-paced environment shift, and so I focused a lot of time on creating personal journaling and reflection systems to keep myself on track. I also spent a lot of time talking to my mom and my college friends about what to keep in mind for my freshman year. The last thing I wanted to do was fall into traps that other college students fall into.

When it came time to leave, my parents and I drove down to LA a few days early to spend time with my family in the area. We took a nice, scenic, 14-hour route along Big Sur, and I have no regrets. After a few fun days with family, the move-in day arrived. I packed up all my things and headed to USC.

Honestly, move-in was a blur. Although I had visited USC’s campus before, I was still awestruck by how beautiful the campus was and how lively the people were. Each time it hit me that this was going to be my new home, I felt even more grateful and happy. My parents and I moved all my stuff into my dorm room, did a bit of shopping, and when it came time to say goodbye, it felt like college really started.

My first week was orientation week. I had no idea what to expect, but I knew that there were so many events that I had to make at least some friends. On the first full day, my dorm floor had a mini-retreat for everyone to get to know each other. I was put in special interest housing, with our section being called APIDA (Asian Pacific Islander Descent Association). It basically meant everyone on our floor was Asian. We had a day-long retreat where we just hung out, got to know each other, played games, and eat food. By the end of it, it felt like I had known them all for months when it had just been less than a day. For the rest of the week, all I did was hang out with my floor mates and have fun. We had all sorts of concerts, socials, parties, meetups, orientations, etc. All alongside some of my new closest friends. It was honestly one of the most fun weeks of my life.

The week after was my first week of classes. It wasn’t where the fun ended, but it certainly was where the work started. Again, I had no idea what to expect. Being previously homeschooled, this was the first time I stepped into a classroom as a student in over 7 years. In my first class, we spent an entire hour on introductions among students, and the second hour talking about the definition of “innovation”. I walked out of my first class, not particularly feeling jazzed up. But as my classes continued, things got better. It was a lot of work, that’s for sure. In the second class of my first day, I had to give a presentation on the spot. I was assigned 4 projects and 1 presentation in my first 3 days. There was a lot of work to do, but at least the work was interesting. And despite all the work, I still made time to have fun with my friends and get work done. We went to the Santa Monica Pier, the first college game of the year, and stayed up past 2am almost every night.

-----

August was held one of the biggest transitions of my life. I don’t think it’s hit me that I’ve entered a new chapter of my life. The kind of work, schedule, and people that I have in my life now is completely different from what they used to be just a few weeks ago. I feel so blessed and grateful for the opportunity to be in this new environment, full of opportunity and fun. My mission is now to make the most of it and come out of college a better person than I came in.


Introducing Bloom


Personalized learning has been the gold standard of education that many institutions have strived towards for decades. The idea of having the content and delivery of educational curriculums be personalized for students has been an ideal, but unattainable vision for teachers across the globe. The problem? *Personalized learning does not scale well.*

The only method of personalized learning that has succeeded is in one-to-one or one-to-few teaching scenarios, where any one instructor is responsible for teaching a manageable number of learners. Though this has been successful, not every learner has the financial means or opportunity to have a personal instructor.

Currently, personalized learning at scale is only tackled by ambitious teachers, trying to personalize their class’s curriculum. This usually ends up leaving the teacher overloaded, overwhelmed, and burnt out. There’s no proper infrastructure for teachers to personalize their curriculums for their students, let alone platforms for the average consumer learner to have personalized curriculums created and managed for them.

**TLDR; Personalized learning lacks the customizable infrastructure to optimize educational content towards individual learners.**

Introducing Bloom, a speculative re-imagining of personalized learning at scale. Bloom is a learning platform that accommodates all of an individual learner’s needs to create a curriculum that changes and personalizes to the learner as they make progress. Every learner has their own learning preferences, assessment preferences, learning goals, and specifications on what they want to learn, and Bloom uses all of this information to personalize educational curriculums to you.

Here’s how you create a personalized course on Bloom:

1. Describe a topic you want to learn about
2. Upload any existing content to use in the personalized course
3. Specify your learning and assessment preferences
4. Specify your existing knowledge level
5. Specify your learning goals
6. Customize the course structure
7. Receive your personalized course

Once you have your own personalized course, you can start learning! There are a few nuances attached to each course on Bloom that makes it truly personalized to the user, without creating a confusing user experience.

!["Course_Look"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Course_Look.svg)

Courses on Bloom are made up of modules and lessons, similar to other online learning platforms. But on Bloom, the next module in your course is only generated once you finish the previous module. This allows for the course to be personalized as you complete it, as the content within modules will be generated based on your level of knowledge of the various concepts in the course. Concepts you struggle with will be emphasized more, whereas concepts you’re comfortable with will not be emphasized as much.

The lessons within each module are optimized for evaluating your knowledge, and understanding your strengths and weaknesses. Lessons are frequently embedded with quiz questions to test your understanding, and before you complete each lesson you must rate how comfortable you are with the information taught in the lesson. Any concepts you’re struggling with can be self-reported, all of which is taken into account when module reviews and assessments are generated.

Overall, Bloom courses are architected to be very fluid. Bloom collects as much information as possible about your knowledge level, and uses that to personalize the course content to your needs. With the information collected while creating your course and the frequent assessment of your knowledge level throughout the course, Bloom can modify your course so that you will have achieved all of your learning goals by the time you’ve completed it.

### Moodboard

Throughout my moodboarding process, I was imagining a minimalistic, classic design with a light style, serif fonts, and clean layouts. Online learning platforms require a lot of multi-modal content to be served, inevitably guaranteeing a semi-overwhelming interface. With this in mind, I wanted to make sure the platform was minimalistic, ensuring the user wouldn’t be further overwhelmed with unnecessary illustrations, animations, or colors.

!["moodboard"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/moodboard.svg)

### Branding

The first iteration of the brand system for Bloom (formerly Sprout) followed closely in the footsteps of the initial moodboard, highlighting serif fonts but keeping a sans body font to make sure the body of each lesson is standard and readable.

!["Sprout_Branding"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Sprout_Branding.svg)

I wasn’t quite happy with the Sprout branding. Even though it contained the main elements I wanted from my moodboard, the color seemed too common and the logo icon was pretty basic and lacked meaning. After a lot of design inspiration and help from friends, I was able to change the name and brand to Bloom. Using Airbnb as inspiration, I selected a similar color and font for a clean, readable aesthetic that still contained a bold color.

!["Bloom_Branding"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Bloom_Branding.svg)

### High fidelity prototype

The high-fidelity prototype ([view on Figma](https://www.figma.com/proto/zp7QG1qQCRJOXOFBTVBFyS/Bloom?page-id=202%3A3568&type=design&node-id=204-342&viewport=1595%2C-2470%2C0.28&t=CymS9PH6gWMZ7icM-9&scaling=min-zoom&starting-point-node-id=204%3A342&show-proto-sidebar=1)) is made up of two main flows: creating a course and taking a course.

The [course creation flow](https://www.figma.com/proto/zp7QG1qQCRJOXOFBTVBFyS/Bloom?page-id=202%3A3568&type=design&node-id=204-1599&viewport=1595%2C-2470%2C0.28&t=CymS9PH6gWMZ7icM-9&scaling=min-zoom&starting-point-node-id=204%3A1599&show-proto-sidebar=1) is designed to add a significant amount of friction, forcing the user to put thought into their answers. There are quite a few questions that the user needs to answer to create a personalized course, so each question is displayed in a different “step” of the process allowing the user to focus on one answer at a time.

At the end of the initial question answering, the structure of modules is generated and available for the user to customize for themselves. This gives the user autonomy over what they choose to learn, keeping their own personal learning goals in mind. Multiple modalities of modification are available for the user to make both large or small changes - they can either manually edit/delete modules or chat with an assistant to add new modules.

The [course experience](https://www.figma.com/proto/zp7QG1qQCRJOXOFBTVBFyS/Bloom?page-id=202%3A3568&type=design&node-id=204-5239&viewport=1595%2C-2470%2C0.28&t=CymS9PH6gWMZ7icM-9&scaling=min-zoom&starting-point-node-id=204%3A5239&show-proto-sidebar=1) is designed to follow similar design standards as other MOOC (massive open online course) platforms like Udemy and Coursera to highlight the lesson content while giving easy access to the course structure. Many of the AI-based personalizations are done behind the curtains in the JIT (just-in-time) module generation. User-driven actions are subtly integrated into the existing interface, and can be expanded upon being triggered.

Here are a few feature highlights of the course experience:

#### Multimodal embedded assessments

!["Assessment_Formats"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Assessment_Formats.svg)

Assessments are multimodal and embedded. There are multiple forms of assessment that learners can be tested with, including multiple choice, checkboxes, long answer, audio/speech based, and project based. 

!["Assessment_Embedded"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Assessment_Embedded.svg)

Upon incorrect answers, Bloom is able to provide real-time feedback on your answer and give subtle hints to gear you towards a more holistic answer.

!["Assessment_Feedback"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Assessment_Feedback.svg)

These assessments can be embedded directly into lessons, allowing users to solidify their knowledge during each lesson. They can also be re-generated (similar to ChatGPT) and learners are able to generate more assessment questions on demand if they decide to further test their understanding. 

#### Suggested resources

!["Suggested_Resources"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Suggested_Resources.svg)

To support the learner’s curiosity, curated resources are provided at the end of each lesson, allowing the user to personally explore the lesson content deeper.

#### User learning feedback loops

!["Feedback_loops"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Feedback_loops.svg)

Personalized experiences are built on top of user feedback loops, and personalized learning is no exception. Bloom courses are designed to take in as much feedback as possible. All assessment results are used in the course’s personalization, giving clear indication as to which concepts the user excels and struggles with. At the end of each lesson, the learner is required to self-evaluate their knowledge of the respective lesson content, with the option to self-identify what they’re struggling with. This information is used to customize future lesson content to support the user in their weaker concepts and remove unnecessary content that the user is comfortable with already. This personalization cycle allows the course to be formatted towards what the learner needs to fully understand the material while allowing them to feel like they’re making progress.

#### Personalized module reviews & assessments

!["Module_review"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Module_review.svg)

At the end of each module, a review of each lesson inside the module is created for the learner. A score is generated for each lesson, measuring the learner’s grasp of each lesson. Based on the learner’s score for any given lesson, supportive material is given to clear any confusions they may have before taking their module assessment.

!["Module_assessment"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Module_assessment.svg)

After the module review, the learner must take the module assessment to test their understanding and finish the module. The questions are geared towards verifying their strong areas of knowledge, as well as instructing them on weaker areas of knowledge.

#### AI-enhanced learning

!["Highlight_Pane"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Highlight_Pane.svg)

Inspired by Notion’s integration of AI, you can easily highlight any text in any lesson and select an AI-driven action to perform on that text. For example, you can highlight a paragraph that may sound confusing and simplify it. Another example, you can ask for a metaphor/analogy to convey a specific concept that may be confusing.

!["Command_Bar"](https://calix.dev/static/bloom/Command_Bar.svg)

For larger AI-driven actions, Bloom provides a command bar that can be easily accessed on any lesson (except assessments) to simplify lesson content, answer questions, and support the learner in any way possible. The command bar interface also opens the door for an actions marketplace in the future, allowing third-party developers to build custom integrated actions for learners.

### Conclusion

Personalized learning at scale is something that could help students and learners overall make huge strides in their personal and professional lives. Most commonly, personalized learning has been a concept promoted and experimented with inside of classrooms, but learners of all ages and backgrounds have huge potential to benefit from it as well.

Bloom was an interesting look into what generalized infrastructure for personalized learning could look like for consumer learners, and what an optimized personalized learning experience could look like. I still believe that in-person and immersive learning experiences provide a separate dimension of education, but in our now digital-native world, the possibility for a platform like Bloom to be built and distributed becomes more feasible every day.


Bugs


Any programmers reading right now understand the torture of having bugs in your code. I sure do. But, have you ever had the same issue popup for 5 weeks straight? I have. Here’s the story of Hours, and my 5 weeks of torture.

**DISCLAIMER:** The dates you’ll see do not naturally add up to 5 weeks, and that’s because there were at least 4 other incidents that I did not cover here. They weren’t significant enough to be mentioned.

## First strike (Feb 21)

Woke up on a nice Saturday morning. I had just built and released a big feature for Hours the previous night and was feeling great. Activity on Hours was usually low on weekends, so I had a few more features and housekeeping items planned to knock out that weekend. I was also excited that day because I was going to be participating as a speaker in a panel speaking about landing internships in high school.

Picked up my phone and started scrolling through my notifications. But then, I realized something was wrong. I saw 10+ bug reports, an overflowing inbox of messages from users saying nothing was loading, and alerts from my monitoring services saying the Hours servers had completely crashed.

This issue is what’s called a scalability issue. It’s not necessarily an issue with your code, but the way your application is set up. If your infrastructure is inefficient, your servers will die as more people use it. You can’t just rollback your code, or point at a specific part of your code and fix it - you need to restructure everything.

For 4 hours, I sat alone in my office debugging, reading logs, and googling in pure panic. And don’t worry, there were at least 2-3 crying sessions, but we don’t talk about that 🤫 

But finally! At noon I implemented a solution, and the servers were working again. I made a bunch of small changes and scaled my pricing tier to make everything work. By then, the panel was just about to start and I still hadn’t brushed my teeth, eaten anything, changed my clothes, drank water, or walked my dog. I did all of those things, happy with myself and my work, and finally relieved that it was all over.

After I came back from walking my dog, 10 minutes before the panel started, the servers crashed **again.** 

I ended up having to speak at this panel, while debugging at the same time, and continued the same torture as the morning for the next 4 hours, until I had to leave to play tennis with a friend, still with no fix. After coming back and having some time to think and clear my head, I was able to fix everything pretty quickly.

So in total, I ended up spending 9 hours in one day fixing issues and pulling my hair out, all while all of my users were just piling complaints upon me. But, I was happy it was all finally over.

## Morning Brew (Feb 23)

I was on Cloud 9. Why? Hours was just featured in Morning Brew! Morning Brew is the biggest email newsletter in the world, with over 2.5m subscribers and being owned by Business Insider. Peaking every single metric and getting the credibility of a publication as famous as Morning Brew made me feel so validated, and the last 4 months of pouring my heart and soul into this project felt so worth it.

Things could only go up from here… or maybe not.

## Second strike (Feb 24-26)

Imagine being able to celebrate. After achieving something super amazing, and just when I thought I was all that, reality hit me like a train.

Another scalability issue. And this time, even bigger than before - so big that there were no small changes I could make, no pricing tier high enough to fix it. I spent 18 hours that day trying absolutely everything I could - new frameworks, tools, tiers, everything. I skipped 2 meals that day, just sitting at my computer and contemplating what the heck I was doing with my life. There were so many moments of stress, to the point where I almost gave up at least 4 times.

So there I was, sitting at my desk alone at 1am, with absolutely no idea what I was going to do. It hurt. I was dancing with happiness the day prior, and here I was, completely hopeless. I had run into a wall that I could not pass, so there was only 1 thing I could do: a maintenance period.

It would make no sense to leave Hours open if it wasn’t working. At least if I shut down the platform so that no one could use it, I would be able to work on this issue in peace without hearing complaints every 5 minutes. So, that’s exactly what I did.

The next day, and after calling with my mentor a bunch, I realized there was only one option: a data restructure. The way the data was structured at the time was super inefficient and messy, and it was affecting the performance of my servers. 

Though I was happy that I had found the solution to my issue, I was super dreadful. There were 3 things I would have to do: rebuild the data models, migrate all of the current data into those new models, and re-write all of the server code, while also making sure every single operation was formatted to run as efficiently as possible. Basically, I had to rebuild all of the backend logic used on Hours to appeal to the new data structures. A huge task.

What did I do? **I grinded.** I completed the entire data restructure within 20 cumulative hours of non-stop work across 2 days, and finally got a newly revamped platform up and running by day 3, and finally ended the 3-day maintenance period. I was so tired and relieved - I knew the revamp that had been implemented was legit, and would stop these issues for a while.

## Platform migrations (Mar 6)

Did you really think a data restructure and logic code rewrite was enough to fix the scalability issues? Clearly, it wasn’t.

**Another issue appeared.** This time, the real-time aspect of Hours was breaking. The aspect of Hours that allows sessions to function properly was overloaded. It was an issue that had popped up a few times before, but this time the servers were beyond stressed - it was completely obliterated.

Again, I had another day full of debugging, googling, and pulling my hair out. After 15 hours of searching and being on the verge of putting up another maintenance period, I found out that the platform I was hosting my servers on, Heroku, was the worst platform I could possibly use for real-time activity. I realized I would need to migrate my servers to a new platform, another huge task. Luckily this issue had popped up on a pretty slow weekend, so there were less complaints and no need to shut down the platform. But, this also meant I only had 2 days to finish this migration in preparation for Monday.

The first attempt at this platform migration was using AWS. There was just one little thing I forgot: AWS is one of the hardest platforms to use I could’ve chosen. After almost 8 hours of tutorials, calls with my mentor, and configuration fails, I finally gave up. AWS has so many services that they tie multiple of them together when deploying a new platform, making it not only hard to actually do, but even just understand.

My second attempt was migrating to Google Cloud Platform. A much better choice than AWS, but still not great. It only took me around 4 hours to configure everything needed to not only host the Hours servers, but also all the surrounding developer processes needed to build efficiently. I would’ve stuck with GCP, but there was a big issue. GCP would consistently kill all real-time connections after 1 hour, which was bad. Hours sessions run > 5 hours on average, and making everyone lose connection and have to regain connection every hour was something that would not work out. I was so close, but still had to start over.

Finally, I was too late. It was already Monday morning, users were flooding the site, and everything was breaking. But weirdly, I felt kind of at peace. I was so sick and tired of trying to appeal to my users and stressing over things that were out of my control. And thank goodness for this composure. My final attempt at a platform migration was to Digital Ocean, which I was able to configure, test, and release within 2 hours, finally solving this real-time issue.

## Database crash (Mar 13)

This came out of the blue. To this day, I still have no idea why this issue popped up, or what events triggered it.

Things had been smooth up until this point - there weren’t as many crashes and I had a good 2 week streak of 100% uptime.

And then, the performance of my servers went straight through the floor. 

You know the drill. I spent 10 hours that day stressing, receiving and apologizing to complaints, and trying to figure out what the issue could possibly be. The whole day I was just thinking, “How many issues could I possibly run into? I didn’t even know that this many things could fail.”

I finally pinpointed the issue: our database. For some reason, our hosting provider did not tell us this, but we had overrun the limits for our current pricing tier. A simple upgrade, and the deed was done.

## Database crash pt. 2 (Mar 29)

Here’s the context: we are 3 days away from signing the final contracts to finalize the Hours x Fiveable acquisition, and we just had an influencer TikTok go viral - over 1m views.

Because of the viral TikTok, all of our data almost doubled. We had over 60k sessions created, and well over 15k users at that point. The new surge of data exposed a part of Hours that I thought was prepared to scale: our database. Around noon, I started getting a surge of emails from my database provider saying that the CPU usage on my database was skyrocketing above 300%.

No big deal, right Calix? This isn’t your first rodeo, it’s like your 6th.

That’s true, but there was a lot more added pressure this time. Why? Because the acquisition signing was 3 days away. The process had taken over 5 weeks at that point, and seeing a huge production crash like this could possibly put the deal in jeopardy.

And once again, another 14 hour debugging session was put into place. Checking the ins and outs of the database, seeing it’s relation with the server performance, and upscaling and downscaling the pricing tier - nothing would work.

After many hours of searching, I had a clear idea of what was wrong and I was close to fixing it, it just required a bit more work. After a small break and dinner, I was able to implement a fix within 2 hours and ensure everything was working properly.

-------

## Epilogue

Building a startup is hard. More specifically, building a product that a lot of people use is hard. Obviously a great product requires a great idea, a great market, and many other factors. But purely just building and maintaining it can be very tricky, and I learned that the hard way.

Though this blog was mostly just to tell my story, I do ask one thing of everyone reading.

When you’re using an app or a website and it crashes, don’t be too critical. The hardest part about all of the issues I ran into along the way weren’t necessarily the issue itself, but dealing with all of the complaints from users. 

It all felt backwards for me: I was pouring my time, energy, and life into building this product for my users, and when an issue popped up and I was putting everything I had into fixing it, I still had to deal with all of the complaints. And at the end, I was the one apologizing, even though I wasn’t getting anything from them. 

I now have respect for anyone building a platform and putting it out there, and sympathy for those maintaining it when it crashes. I hope everyone else does as well after reading my story. When an app you use crashes or doesn’t work temporarily, don’t be critical or rude towards the developers or talk trash about the app to your friends. Be kind and understanding, because whoever is working on this behind the scenes is a lot more stressed than you are.

## Acknowledgements

I want to give a huge shoutout to my mom, and my mentor Vincenzo. 

My mom played such a huge role in every single incident by helping me calm down and think logically when I couldn’t think straight through all of the emotions.

My mentor Vincenzo played a **huge** role in helping me fix all of the huge technical barriers. He gave me guidance on the data restructure and migration, as well as the platform migration. His technical expertise was absolutely priceless, and I could not have come this far in terms of technical scalability if it weren’t for him.


Burnout


Burnout. What an interesting concept isn’t it?

You hear about it all over social media. People tell you about it. Sometimes you even feel burnt out. There’s so much info everywhere that I’m not gonna write about what burnout is, or what steps you should take to fix it. I just want to share my personal experience with it, and how I’ve dealt with it.

I’ve experienced a lot of burnout. I work on different projects, startups, and internships for around 12-15 hours every day, including weekends. I never take days where I don’t work at all; those days are called vacations, and it’s only possible when I’m not allowed within a 5-mile radius of my laptop.

With a lot of constant work comes burnout, and my burnout comes in cycles. Maybe I’d have 1-2 weeks of solid, consistent work, and then hit a point of burnout after that amount of time. After I’ve dealt with it, the cycle just repeats. Now, I’ve never taken a class or read an article about how to deal with burnout and fully understood it because, frankly, I suck at reading, and I also don’t know if this “cycle” is considered healthy. But, what I do know is that dealing with burnout is really not that complex.

**So Calix, if it’s not that complex, then how do you deal with burnout?**

It’s easy. **You rest. You take breaks.** But, you need to be able to rest properly.

I know what you’re thinking: “Calix, that’s the most idiotic statement I’ve ever heard. How does someone rest properly??”

**And like any engineer, I have to say it depends.**

What does it depend on? Well, everyone’s different. And you can’t trust every article you see online on “how to fix burnout” to give you the answer. But, the short answer is that you need to do what you enjoy, **but it must be unrelated to your work.**

For me, I’m one of those people that some could call a workaholic. If I’m not working, I’m thinking about my work. I’m ideating different strategies when I’m away from a computer. I’m writing down notes and new ideas on my phone. I’m always thinking about it.

So, taking a “spa day” or a “self-care day” isn’t gonna help me at all. I’m not the type to sit down and read a book, or just chill on the couch for fun. I do things that occupy my mind, but aren’t necessarily challenging me.

But, I love playing tennis. As not many people know, I used to play competitive tennis around the national level. Though I stopped playing competitively years ago, I still enjoy going out to the courts a couple times a week to play with friends and family. It’s enjoyable because my level skill has not diminished, and I can play with peace of mind without that competitive edge. It’s a great way for me to relax, take my mind off of work, and sharpen my focus towards something good for my mind and body.

Tennis is a great way for me to relax, but for others, it may be different.

My advice to you? **Find what you enjoy the most that’s completely unrelated to your work, and go do that.**

Enjoy knitting? Knit something. Basketball? Go shoot some hoops. Rest doesn’t always mean relaxing your body, but relaxing your mind. Take your mind off of your work, so that you can truly take a break and come back refreshed.

-----

At the end of the day, burnout is inevitable, and not always a bad thing. Burnout is a sign that you’re trying and working hard; those who don’t push themselves and strive to become better every day will never burn out of their work. Allow it to shift your perspective as a reminder to enjoy things outside of work, and to take care of yourself. You don’t need to dedicate an entire day for “self-care,” just rest and enjoy your hobbies every day.


Career


“What should I do with my career? How do I know I’m on the right path?”

I’ve been asked these questions a thousand times, with the expectation that I can actually give them a single answer.

It’s impossible for someone else to answer that question for you. It’s something that you need to figure out for yourself. But, that doesn’t mean there can’t be a framework for helping you determine what the best career path for you is. It all comes from a simple rule:

**Great careers come from great interests.**

Though it’s true that many “booming” fields are very lucrative with a bright and prosperous future, any “interest” that is powered by materialistic desires will always die out at the first encounter with adversity. We can’t power our career paths with shallow values if we want to have longevity in mind.

For me, my journey in SWE started from a point of pure interest. Both my parents have a strong background in computer science, but have never forced me into the field. I got my start through ethical hacking and penetration testing. I had no understanding of how high the salaries of software engineers were, or how much technology was revolutionizing the future - **it was just fun.** Hijacking webcams, installing keyloggers, and tinkering with little scripts filled my days and thoughts, and my pivot into actual programming was only initiated when a new interest in building was sparked inside of me.

I try to use my experiences to influence others at the beginner level. Many great pioneers in their respective fields start their journeys from intrinsic interest to notable mastery, and I think that this repeating pattern is one that many can learn from. Peer pressure and short-term desires can offset your judgement, and if your motivation for the work that you do is extrinsic, it will quickly fade as soon as your expectations are met or out of reach.

In summary? Find your career interests, pick the most promising one, and give it a try. Don’t let outside influences cloud your judgement, just stay genuine. If it doesn’t work out, try again. Not every attempt you make will reap the benefits you seek, but there’s never any reason to not try again.

**If we want to have a successful and fulfilling career path, we need to invest our time into things that make us genuinely interested and content.**



College Applications (pt. 1)


_This blog post was written in late January 2022. It was not posted until now because the college admissions process was not finished until May 2022._

My feelings about college have fluctuated over time.

Up until middle school, I never really thought about college. It was always so far into the future that I never thought to ask myself if that’s the future I wanted. And I’m glad I didn’t - I had plenty of other things to think about and explore back then.

Contrary to this, there was always an exception: Stanford. Throughout my childhood, my parents always told me that Stanford was the best school in the world. Since I lived close by, I visited frequently and saw the beauty of the campus many times. Even way back then, I knew that Stanford was the college I wanted to go to. I still remember my papers from 4th grade, reading how my younger self wanted to go to Stanford when he grew up. It was my dream school, and still is to this day.

Starting in high school, it felt like everyone around me was just gearing up for college. Everyone was taking AP tests, SAT/ACT tests, SAT subject tests, just all kinds of tests that I wasn’t aware of. Meanwhile, I paid no attention, partly because my school provided no support in guiding that realm of high school academics, but also because I didn’t want to think about it.

As deadlines for standardized tests came closer and my GPA started to matter more, I began to resent the idea of college. I was scared of it - not just the idea of living alone but also all the torturous work that was involved with getting accepted into a good school. I’ve never been a great test-taker, and I sucked at reading, writing, and math. Over time, I tried to convince my parents that I could succeed without going to school and convinced myself into denial of needing any form of higher education. Though I believed what I was saying and still do to a certain degree, I knew the real reason why I was advocating for dropping out so much was that I was scared. 

Instead of doing what everyone else was doing, in my sophomore year, I went my own route. I doubled down on my craft and found success in it over time. I cared less about my grades and did the bare minimum to maintain a GPA over 3.7. I purposely took easier classes to free up my time and participated more in outside extracurricular activities than in-school clubs. I was happy with what I was learning and accomplishing, but I couldn’t help but sweat a little bit every time the idea of college came up.

In the summer before my senior year, everything changed. I sold my company and I got an actual job with an actual salary. I met amazing people and opportunities opened left and right. Through meeting so many people, I also got to interact with so many university students, many of them virtually and professionally. I also made friends with a handful of students at UC Berkeley and had some of the most fun times of my life hanging out with them. I slowly realized that college could be a great option for me, purely for the experience. Student life and networking became my motivations for applying to college, and not necessarily for the education or the degree. I continually became more interested in becoming a college student as I experienced the fun life of a college student.

By then, my senior year was starting, so I decided to put effort into my college applications and open up options for possible acceptances. I scrambled around, asking friends about how the college application system worked. I joined a college consulting program and dished out many dollars to be guided through this process. I put together a huge list of schools and started working on each one. I re-ignited my desire to go to Stanford, and unintentionally manifested it in many different ways. I told everyone who asked that I wanted to go to Stanford. I wrote it down in my journal day after day. I even announced it on multiple podcasts and in press interviews.

It wasn’t an easy process by any means. Like any other high school senior who’s applied to college, I went through much pain and suffering. The constant revisions, harsh feedback, and massive imposter syndrome that can come with applying to college is overwhelming. And with my situation being a special case, many around me questioned and judged my choices for applying to colleges. I have constantly questioned if college was worth my time by peers, friends, and even my college counselors. Though it was never discouraging, it made me doubtful at times.

Through all the hardship, I slowly got through it. After weeks of hard work, I submitted my first application to Stanford, as part of the restricted early action pool. I was so nervous, but then all I could do was wait.

Soon enough, it was December 15 - decision day. I was anticipating the decision release the entire day, so much to the point where I couldn’t focus. When the time came to actually open the decision, I prepared myself. I paced back and forth in my backyard, mentally preparing myself to open my status update. I locked myself in my room and started recording my reaction on my phone. I had all the pieces in place to open my decision, but it still took me 15 minutes to actually do so.

“Dear Calix, I am very sorry to let you know we are unable to offer you admission to Stanford.”

Rejected. Not even deferred. Stanford didn’t want to consider me further in comparison to a new pool of applications. They knew they didn’t want me, and they knew I wasn’t good enough.

I was heartbroken. I know many are advised to keep expectations low in preparation for failure, but I couldn’t help but have some hope that I could’ve been accepted and imagine what life would’ve been like at my dream school. But no. Despite all my aspirations, the only thing that displayed before me was a rejection of my childhood dream.

I laid on my bed and cried. I read my rejection letter over and over, hoping the words would change. I even went for a walk in the rain, just to get away from this disappointment for a little bit. In complete agony, I had to respond to everyone asking me how my decision went, and hear their long rants about how I should’ve gotten in. What was worse was seeing those around me receive their admission into their dream schools broke my heart even more. Though I was happy for them, it pained me at the same time.

I was sad, but I couldn’t stay sad for long. By that time, it was winter break, and many college deadlines in early January 2022 were approaching. This was the only opportunity I’ll have to apply to these colleges for a long time, and I was in the perfect position to do so. If I couldn’t have my dream school, then I was determined to do my best to create other options.

Over the course of 3 weeks, I worked day and night to submit college applications to over 14 colleges, many of which I didn’t even plan to apply to. I reviewed my Stanford application and took away lessons to improve my new applications. I solidified my narrative and theme and made sure to be clear with my intentions of why I was applying to these schools. 

----------------------

I don’t have a happy ending to this chapter of my life. I got rejected by Stanford, and have yet to hear back from any other college as of this moment. I still ache inside when I see others’ college acceptances, being reminded of what I could not have. I’ve accepted my failure for what it is and moved on.

But through this, it reinforced a crucial lesson in my life. No matter how much sadness, anger, or overall emotion you have, life has to go on. If you stay in your place of grief for too long, life will leave you in the dust. It’s okay to break down and cry when you fail, just as long as you don’t stay like that.

With all my college applications submitted, I’m happy to be back in a state of focusing on myself and my own personal and professional goals. And when decision season rolls around, who knows what will happen. I can’t say for sure what the results will be, and or where I will end up.

All I know is that things will turn out exactly the way they should.

_Read [College Applications (pt. 2)](https://calix.dev/writing/college-applications-2)._


College Applications (pt. 2)


_For context, read [College Applications (pt. 1)](https://calix.dev/writing/college-applications-1)._

Finally. I just submitted my last college application. After writing thousands of words, cutting them down into hundreds, and editing them over and over, it was finally done. By then, it was mid-January and all I could do was wait until March when all of the college decisions would be released. Many other high school seniors I was connected with were stressed out of their minds, finding it hard to sleep, eat, and stay away from constantly scrolling through r/ApplyingToCollege.

I wasn’t the same way. I was weirdly at peace and decided to spend my time and attention on myself. Everything from exercise, skill sharpening, focusing on my job, etc. I learned new skills, I recovered old ones. I started reading books and listening to audiobooks. I knew that worrying wouldn’t change my outcome, or make the decisions release faster, so I didn’t bother thinking about it.

By the time college decisions came around, I was actually excited. Sure, I was extremely anxious and nervous, but I was so excited to open decision letters and see the results. I was even more excited to film every single moment, and hopefully compile a college reactions video for myself to look back on forever. I clearly pictured my worst-case scenario in my head as a coping mechanism, and that scenario was that I wouldn’t be accepted into a single school I applied to and I would take a gap year.

Starting off, I was rejected from both UW, Cal Poly Pomona, and UC Davis, which was extremely humbling and set the stage for the rest of my reactions. I was accepted into UC Merced and SJSU, both of which are great schools, but not schools I was necessarily excited to attend. I was then rejected by Harvey Mudd, and then Babson College, UCLA, UC San Diego, and UC Irvine all on the same day. Morale through the floor. I was accepted by UC Riverside, but again, it wasn’t a school I wanted to go to. I was then waitlisted at UC Santa Cruz and rejected by UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara. To have all of those things happen within the span of a few days completely shattered my confidence. Almost everyone else I knew already had a decision they were happy with. For me, I didn’t have an offer that I felt happy with or even comfortable taking.

March 26 rolls around. My confidence is at an all-time low and the only optimistic comment I can make is “I hope the private universities like me more than the public schools.” I heard a rumor that the USC decision was being released that day, but I didn’t want to think about it. I was spending the day with Katherine, having fun, and then I got a notification that the USC decision was available. I really didn’t want to open it until I got home, but I was persuaded to open it then. Through all my rejections, I had forgotten how much I wanted to go to USC. I was applying for the Iovine and Young Academy, where I had spent countless hours fulfilling the extended application requirements and also went through a rigorous interview process back in February. I wasn’t even excited to open my decision, I was just hoping it wouldn’t be soul-crushing. We went to the library, found a study room, set up the camera, and opened the letter. I was accepted.

Getting rejected over and over can really play with your self-esteem, and bring it to the floor. But, I, a student who never really took academics seriously, never took a single AP or honors class, and never completed a standardized test, was just accepted into a selective program at a selective school. Everything else that had happened didn’t matter anymore. I was beyond happy. I made sure to take my time to let it sink in and to celebrate.

Over the next few days, I had a lot more decisions to open. But I wasn’t nervous - I was excited. All the pressure I was putting on myself had been lifted off my shoulders with my USC acceptance, and I could finally relax. I was waitlisted at Carnegie Mellon for Computer Science which I was really surprised and happy with. Then, I was rejected by Northwestern, UMich, Boston University, Vanderbilt, and Tufts. I was waitlisted by Syracuse and NYU which I was really happy with as well, rejected by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and then obliterated on Ivy Day with rejections from Cornell, Brown, Harvard, and UPenn.

Overall, I applied to 28 schools (way more than I should’ve), was accepted by 4, waitlisted by 3, and rejected by 21. 

-----------------------

Looking back, this is all a fond memory and one of my favorite stories to tell. The fact that I spent so much extra time and money applying to over 14 schools that I initially wasn’t going to apply to, and yet got rejected and waitlisted by all of them is more of a funny memory than a painful one.

Beyond that, I can see now that I was in pure denial about my worst-case scenario. My backup plan for over a year was to take a gap year if I didn’t receive an offer I felt happy about. It was a realistic plan. I already had offers to work full-time, and I could always live at home and work on any ideas that came to mind. But, only after I received my decisions, did I realize that I never wanted to take a gap year. It was purely a narrative that was given to me by so many peers, and it was supposed to provide me comfort, but it didn’t. I knew with my heart and soul that I wanted to get into a school I was proud of, and I was scared to take a gap year.

I can also see the benefit in some of my rejections. Getting rejected at Stanford was one of the worst rejections I had ever received in my life. But, going to USC provides an opportunity to escape the Bay Area, the place I called home my entire life. It would place me closer to my extended family, make the trip home relatively cheap and quick, and still allow me to enjoy California weather.

-----------------------

I’m more than excited to attend USC IYA this fall as part of the Class of 2026 alongside my other ~30 cohort members. This was never the outcome I would’ve expected, but I’m so glad it turned out this way. The journey started off pretty badly, but I’m starting to learn that the hard parts of life make for a better story to tell.



December 2022

 

[December 2022 photo dump](https://photos.app.goo.gl/NwtbFDMYsdeVjYjJA)

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Hello and welcome back to the last monthly reflection of 2022! I’m actually writing this on-time because I’ve also been busy writing my 2022 reflection, which should be published by now. It’s also been pouring almost every day here in the Bay Area, pretty abnormal, so I have no choice but to stay inside and work anyways. 

I know that this is just my reflection for December and not the year as a whole, but it’s hard not to think about the entire year holistically. December was definitely one of my more mellow, toned-down months, but nonetheless I think it was a good way to close out the year.

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I started off December in finals week. Campus was more dead than usual, but luckily a select few of my friends were less busy than the rest of the students. A few of my friends and I drove down to Irvine and spent the day at the Irvine Spectrum Center, I had a potluck with some other friends, and did a secret santa gift opening with my classmates in IYA. I attended a USC Alumni Entrepreneurship networking event and got a bunch of weird looks from ‘90s graduates when they saw my nametag with ‘26 on it. Finally, I grabbed a nice sushi dinner with my other Venture Partner at Contrary to cap off a successful semester of founder events and mixers.

For IYA students, finals week wasn’t too rigorous since we don’t really have exams for our classes. On the other hand, we have a ton of final projects in replacement of that. So, I spent my finals week working on a 3D rendering presentation for my prototyping class and a 3D game in Unity for my 3D design class. 

I ended up finishing finals almost a week before winter break started, so I left campus and came home early. I didn’t have that much to do at home besides complain about how cold it was, so I spent pretty much every hour of every day working. My family and I then drove down to Palm Springs for a holiday vacation and spent time with our extended family in LA. Stayed at a nice resort, played on grass tennis courts, took the Palm Springs Aerial Tram up the mountains and saw snow, and spent Christmas in LA with friends and family.

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Pretty short for this month! But, a lot went on behind the scenes, and I took the last few days of December and the year to reflect on the progress I made this year, and what I was looking forward to in 2023.


Failures


*Last updated on: May 20, 2022*

**Failure sucks.** But at the same time, it gives good context to where you've been and where you may go in the future. It teaches us about ourselves, allows us to reflect, and if you take it the right way, it can give you hope for the future.

I like to put my failures out on display because I don't like to give off the vibe that I never fail and discourage others. I'm a normal human being just like everyone else, and I've faced failure and rejection just as much as many others.

**NOTE:** This "failure resume" is inspired by [Katherine Huang](https://katmh.com) (we're not related). 

### 2022
- *More to come...*
- Rejected from Google CSSI
- Dealt *(and still dealing with)* longer-term burnout
- Rejected from 21 colleges out of 28 applications - *[similar post](/writing/college-applications-1)*
- Had internship offer rescinded after 4 hours due to age issues

### 2021
- Rejected from my dream school: Stanford
- Attempted to build 5 projects with failed outcomes
- Rejected from the Coca-Cola scholarship
- Rejected *(+ deferred)* from the Delta Fellowship
- Rejected from the Maker Fellowship
- Rejected from the Bessemer Fellowship
- Rejected from zFellows after an interview
- Rejected from YC S21 batch without an interview
- Rejected from a large batch of startups (Notion, Quizlet, etc.) for a variety of roles
- Rejected from a reputable, unnamed startup after talking with them for 3 weeks
- Lost $200 trying to start a domain reselling business

### 2020
- Rejected from MLH Fellowship and CodeDay Labs
- Started 1Academy with my co-founder, and ended up failing to meet product-market fit, causing us to discontinue the idea
- Recruited people into a previous initiative that later stabbed me in the back
- Applied to 170+ internships, got rejected/ghosted by ~150, and got rejected by 6 after the first round
- Had to quit 3 internships due to time commitments and burnout
- Rejected from multiple officer positions I applied and interviewed for
- Struggled with interval burnout from intense work
- Had to drop out of Google Code-in 2019 & LAHacks Virtual 2020
- Failed at organizing my first online event

### 2019
- Founded my first team within a nonprofit and failed to lead it
- Founded, maintained, and ultimately failed my first attempt at a high-school run nonprofit
- Worked really hard to get an IT internship and failed
- Failed to place Top 10 in the AWS Summit Deepracing competition 2019 (placed #19)
- Failed to complete a take-home exercise from an internship employer and was rejected as a candidate
- Failed to distribute my projects and grow a userbase
- Faced loneliness throughout the year due to lack of social interaction and social skills
- Had a short-term identity crisis

February 2022

 

[February 2022 photo dump](https://app.myrecollect.com/memory/621d254a0255ae00169ae694 )

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February was one of those months that started off slow and calculated, and the rest just sped past me in a blaze. Though in January I was extremely focused on stretching myself, trying new things, and seeking out new experiences, February had a theme of maintenance. Rather than diversifying and intensifying my day-to-day activities, I tried to maintain the workload I had put upon myself in January.

## Professional updates

Looking back, this month I focused more on upskilling myself. Though I’ve always been on my toes, eyes peaked to seize any signs of new opportunities, this month I shifted my focus towards upskilling myself and learning new things.

From a tweet from [Startup Search](https://twitter.com/startupsearch/status/1488936504122646528) by Contrary and a tag from my friend [Matt](https://twitter.com/MattEspoz), I got my hands on [The Design of Everyday Things](https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expanded/dp/0465050654). I usually never read (instead I listen to audiobooks), but I figured I’d challenge myself to read this book this time. It’s taken me 3 weeks to read 100 pages so far (rip), but the lessons have been mind-blowing. Don Norman takes examples of everyday things (doors, interfaces, fridges), and breaks down the most critical design aspects involved that allow us to consider these items as “simple”.

Many who know me know that I haven’t been the biggest advocate of Web3. Seeing unnecessary use cases of this emerging technology coupled with inflated hype from surged VC investment has turned me off anything related to the field. About a week ago, I was waiting for my mom to head out and run some errands, but she had to delay by another hour to take an important phone call. I was left with nothing to do, so I just scrolled around various feeds and emails. I came across an article published by a fellow Edtech Insiders contributor about an [Educator’s Guide to Web3](https://edtechinsiders.substack.com/p/educators-guide-to-web3-for-absolute?utm_source=url). Reading through it, the concepts covered in this article were interesting. At the same time, I had just recently heard of [Buildspace](https://buildspace.so/) as a starting point for getting into Web3 development. I had some time, so I figured, why not give it a try? So, for the past few days I’ve been slowly diving into Solidity and building smart contracts through Buildspace. I don’t quite know what I’m doing, but each day I start to understand things a little bit more. Though I’m not ready to fully immerse myself into Web3, I find the technology very innovative and the potential for new ideas is high. Just the other day, I registered my ENS domain, **calixo.eth**, so feel free to send me anything. 😉

Around the same time as starting in Web3, I started working on a new project. Reminiscing on the excitement I had when I worked on [Recollect](https://myrecollect.com/), a project purely for myself and family, and I was craving that feeling again. Though I won’t share what the idea is, I will say that it’s a mobile app, it’s purely a personal passion project, and the first version is being developed right now. I have no idea where this project will go or how long it will live, but I’m crossing my fingers in hopes that it can be another proud addition to my portfolio.

My updates haven’t been all peaches and rainbows, though. I acknowledge that this month hasn’t been the most successful month in terms of writing. I haven’t published a single Edtech Insiders article due to consistent publish date postponements. I’ve finalized two articles that I absolutely love, but the editing/publishing processes can be long and tedious. Endless revision cycles and idea changes can push publish dates by weeks and months, but I hope to push this content out early in March. 

My writing activity for my personal blog hasn’t been too great either. Besides my monthly reflection, I only published 2 blog posts, both of which were posted at the beginning of the month. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t been trying. There are a couple drafts that I started that never made it to being published because I tried forcing myself to write. This month, I realized that I write the best when I feel inspired to do so, and that seems to come in waves. I have a list of at least 30 different blog ideas, but I haven’t found the interest in writing about any of them. Since I haven’t placed writing as a heavy obligation in my priority list, I’ve resorted to producing content when I feel pulled to do so. Though I’m a bit disappointed, I’m curious to observe how this strategy will fare in March.

## Personal updates

I can confidently say that February emphasized personal experiences and development. I had highs, I had lows, and I learned more about myself each and every time.

Let’s start with a low. Mid-February I received my booster vaccine, and it completely knocked me out. For some reason, I didn’t expect that I would feel any side effects after receiving my shot, but clearly my arrogance didn’t match my immune system. I had a major fever the day after, and uncomfortable arm pain for the following 2 days. While it was a pretty miserable time, it was also peaceful. The moment I woke up and felt the massive fever, I called myself off from work, canceled all my meetings, and allowed myself to truly rest. All day, I just watched TV, lounged around on the couch, and scrolled on Instagram. I obviously needed physical rest, but it was also an excuse to give myself mental rest. After I bounced back from the sickness, I could tell my productivity and efficiency had a major boost.

If you’re on TikTok, you probably know the toxic trait trend (“My toxic trait is that…”). Well, my toxic trait is that I always say I’m down to attend meetups and socials, but then I have to cancel when I realize how far the commute is. For my ODET fellowship, they hosted me and a few other fellows a nice dinner in SF, which I had to relocate to Oakland for an easier commute. Though I was able to attend, I didn’t know that it was hosted at a 21+ bar, and I was rejected from entering the vicinity. I was frustrated at first, but I made the most of the situation and instead treated my mom to a nice dinner in Oakland.

Sometimes, I forget that I’m still a student. Though I went through January without working on any academic work, my second semester started and my course workload was reset. Due to my flexible academic schedule, I was able to focus and finish 3 of my 5 classes within the first week. Granted, they were easier classes, but it’s nice to have it off my plate and out of my mind.

Of course, I visited UC Berkeley twice this month and just had a myriad of fun experiences. I spent my first night there, sleeping in my friends’ dorm rooms and sharing a bed. I decided to take my skateboard and ride around the campus at 2:30am in the morning. I attended my first college party and also assisted a drunk friend in leaving said party. We went on late night drives, had late night conversations, and also chased each other around the dorms in the middle of the night for some reason. I always thought a place like UC Berkeley would inspire me from an educational, academic perspective, but instead it’s the place where I leave behind all common sense and do the craziest things.

Beyond all the fancy, glamorous things, I also took time to clean my room. And I don’t just mean re-organizing things and vacuuming. I set aside an entire afternoon to clean out my gigantic closets full of random books, games, and gadgets I’ve collected over the past 10 years, making sure to sort everything into bags for donation. I got the chance to rearrange my room to create space for me to truly relax, which has been so helpful that I made a [tweet](https://twitter.com/calixo888/status/1492977547444776961) about it. And perhaps my favorite part of cleaning out my room was re-discovering old toys and books I used to obsess over in my younger years.

Other than that, I did many other things. I served at my church, managing projection and camera directing. I completed my last few college interviews. I forced myself to leave my desk and work at a coffee shop at least once each week. Most importantly, I emphasized my habits and consistently maintained them in my daily routines.

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I’m happy to say that I am an improved version of who I was in January, rather than a transformed one. Like I said, February had a theme of maintenance, so instead of constantly seeking and trying new things, I stuck to my habits and slowly improved each day. My habits haven’t quite come to fruition or produced any noticeable results yet, but I can feel that I’m improving each day that I stick with them.

I also want to put it out there that there’s more beyond what I wrote about in this post. Though I enjoy producing content and sharing my story, I create clear boundaries between my work/online life and my personal life because I value personal privacy. As much of an advocate as I am for writing and storytelling, I’ve found that some memories are best kept to myself and those I love.


FOMO

 

**FO·MO** (/ˈfōmō/): anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on social media.

That’s what I was feeling when I saw all my friends posting their flights and meetups at [ETH Denver](https://www.ethdenver.com/). Being uninterested in Web 3.0, I wasn’t even a good candidate to participate at this event. And yet, my mind raced with regretful thoughts of not attending or even being interested in the field. My relaxing weekend activities suddenly felt unproductive and useless.

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I’m no stranger to FOMO. It’s been a common, consistent feeling that I’ve had for quite some time, especially after [exiting my last venture](https://www.calix.dev/writing/hours-acquired-by-fiveable). While I was buried deep in my pursuits for growing my product, it was hard to pay attention to what anyone else was doing. After exiting, I found myself giving more attention to those around me and spending time reading about other people’s success. Communities like Tech Twitter became a pigeonhole full of hype and FOMO, even more so for those who exist in a community full of young teen founders and entrepreneurs. I’ve seen many people in my circle get into web3 and crypto, work on their own startups, and consistently maximize their time towards exponential career growth.

When FOMO hits, it can be the worst feeling ever. Your own priorities can feel insignificant, and doubt can arise in the areas you felt so confident in. You can question the direction you’re heading in, and possibly make some rash decisions. FOMO can rule out reason and why you’re in the situation you’re in, and why you’ve intentionally put yourself there.

My solution to FOMO has been this: stop what I’m doing, take a few deep breaths, and think logically. What am I really missing out on? Am I really missing out on that much? Is this FOMO real or has it spurred up in the heat of the moment?

For example, I’ve felt FOMO for not delving into web3 and crypto, as well as not working on a startup right now. When I start to think logically, I remember why I haven’t followed in pursuit of these things. I haven’t immersed myself in web3 because I’ve decided to specialize in fields I’m passionate about such as education technology and alternative education. I haven’t been working on a startup because I know that right now isn’t a great time for me personally. I’m giving myself the opportunity to enjoy special life milestones like my high school graduation and senior summer, while also giving myself space to become a better operator through work experience.

FOMO isn’t just centered around career events - it’s a social construct too. A couple weeks ago, I had a conversation with my friend Marina, a freshman at UC Berkeley. While chatting casually, the topic of FOMO popped up, and she talked through her experience combatting it as a new college student. In her first semester, she dealt with massive amounts of FOMO because our friend group was constantly mingling and having fun. In order to join in on all the fun, it was impossible to keep a normal work or sleep schedule. 

“In my first semester, I was trying so hard to experience all of the fun memories they were making, but it cost me my sleep and grades. At some point, FOMO is too high maintenance - you can miss out on important aspects of your life. At the end of the day, you can’t have everything seem special. Back when I kept involving myself in everything, I had so many memories that these trips and social events became diluted. Now, I handpick the memories I decide to create, which makes them all very special to me.”

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Throughout all the ups and downs of FOMO, I’ve learned one key lesson: FOMO is sometimes inevitable. It’s more important to learn how to deal with it healthily and effectively. Being self-aware enough to step back and look at the big picture is critical to maintaining a good mental state throughout this rollercoaster of a ride. Getting caught up in FOMO can make you forget the reason why it’s best for you to be in the situation you’re in right now.

**When you fear missing out on something else, you miss out on what you’re lucky enough to experience right now.**



Freelancing in High School — Should You Do It?


We all want to make money. In high school, your amount of freedom varies from family to family. But, most high school students have the freedom to make money on their own and spend it on whatever they want. Now, there are many ways to make money in high school. Some ways are glamorous, others, not so much. And one way to make awesome money is freelancing!

Freelancing is a great way to make money. You get control of your own schedule, you get to pick and choose the clients you want to serve, and it can make you a six-figure salary easily! There’s a special aura around freelancing, and I have personally felt the pressure of getting into freelancing as a side hustle. But is it really a side hustle that you should take on in high school?

** Here are some of the pros and cons of freelancing for those in high school. **

# Pro: No degree required

No one that outsources tasks to freelancing cares about a college degree. Some may, but it matters a lot more about your skills and if you can get the job done.

When applying for full-time jobs, degrees are a metric of general knowledge, commitment, and endurance. It shows that you have a certain level of proficiency in a field of study, and stuck with it throughout several years. Freelancing gigs don’t work that way. You don’t have any papers to sign or contracts to fulfill. You just need the skills to build and deploy whatever the client needs, and have the patience to revise and improve the final product.
In certain fields such as STEM and software engineering, many of the freelancing jobs that you will land will not apply to what you learn in college. Specifically, computer science degrees are mostly theoretical and focus on topics that aren’t applicable to modern-day technology. Those who graduate from coding bootcamps or are self-taught are much more appealing to clients.
Degrees become obsolete in the world of freelancing, and it has helped many college students and dropouts kickstart their careers.

# Con: It’s hard to land jobs

Freelancing is a great side hustle and a great career choice, but no one ever said it was going to be easy. The freelancing community is a highly competitive space, and those who don’t prove themselves and stand out from the competition will be eclipsed by those who do. This especially holds true for those just getting started in freelancing, and that applies to almost all high schoolers.

Here are some reasons why standing out as a freelancer in high school is hard:

## You don’t have enough experience
Remember, you’re competing with professional freelancers with years of experience in the field. They have more past experience than you, which naturally helps them strategize and land more jobs than you can. Don’t take it personally, they’ve built up their status from their hard work and dedication, so expect that to be a roadblock.
You may not have more experience than your competitors, but you can get that over time.

## You don’t have enough credibility
Your competitors have a lot of experience, and with that comes a lot of ratings and testimonials. More than likely, they probably have really high ratings and amazing testimonials. This is something that makes them stand out the most, and it’s what is most comforting and appealing to clients. They want freelancers who have experience in freelancing and proof that others were satisfied with their service.

And can you blame them? If you were in their shoes, would you take the freelancer with tons of great testimonials, an amazing portfolio of projects, and a 5-star rating? Or would you choose the freelancer with no experiences, no testimonials, no ratings, and no portfolio?

Credibility is one of the most important pieces of freelancing, and it definitely shows throughout the community.

# You don’t have the knowledge to land jobs

This is a simple issue, and it has nothing to do with your competition. Sometimes, you simply don’t have the knowledge or skills to apply for the job, making it impossible to stand out. If you don’t have the skills to apply for the job, you’ll either have to find a different job or learn what you need to complete it.

## Your hourly rates are too high
Hourly rates are very important to pay attention to because those outsourcing jobs to freelancers don’t want to pay a whole lot of money. Though credibility and the skills of the freelancer matter, so does how much the clients will be paying them. It’s simple: clients are more inclined to pay the freelancer who has a cheaper hourly rate.

So, with this in mind, you have to be conscious of how much you’re charging per hour. Especially if you have no credibility or experience, you want to charm clients with your hourly rate. You want to show how cheap your service is, enticing clients with smaller budgets to take a chance on you. This is how you can slip through the cracks and land clients where bigger freelancers can’t.

Professional freelancers have adapted to this situation and placed their hourly rates low as well. Just when you think your hourly rate is low, chances are there will be a big freelancer with tons of credibility at the same rate, or even lower. Many big freelancers live outside the United States, so they can afford to put their hourly rates extremely low.
My tip on hourly rates is to look at your competitors and find their hourly rates. Then, put your hourly rate below them by a decent amount. Sure, you may not make as much money, but then at least you’ll have a chance at landing clients.

# Pro: It’s great for work experience

Work experience is highly coveted when applying for any job, and if you don’t plan on freelancing for a career, you’ll definitely need it when applying for jobs in the future. And what better experience to put on your resume than freelancing?

Freelancing shows employers that:
* You have the skills to build real-world products and solve real-world problems
* You have good digital communication
* You are capable of working with clients and making product revisions
* You are not a beginner!

This holds especially true for high school students. Many employers have a mindset that high school students are beginners, and don’t have the skills, knowledge, or ability to work in their preferred industry. Not to mention that many high school students are constantly searching for jobs to fill up their resume, and freelancing can finally help students put something impressive to add.

Another thing that freelancing can do is add to your portfolio. Portfolio projects confirm to future employers that you know what you’re doing and measures your skill level in action. They are very important, and freelancing jobs automatically add new projects to your portfolio that you can show with pride.

# Con: It’s an unstable business

Freelancing is very unstable. Freelancers can make a lot of money, but they can also make absolutely nothing.
Freelancing goes based on supply and demand. There is a demand for outsourcing for some businesses, and freelancers supply that need for cheap work being finished. But, there can be external factors that can crash the entire freelancing business. Some of these may be:
* The global trends have shifted
* There’s a market crash
* There’s too much competition in freelancing

Focusing more on the competition in freelancing, there is a lot of competition. For those who live in the United States, there are jobs everywhere. Thousands of job listings are posted online every day, and many of those positions can be filled by high school students. But, for those who don’t live in the United States, jobs may be hard to find. People in other countries don’t have the same opportunities as those in America. But, with modern-day technology and the Internet, freelancing has been made accessible for almost anyone with a computer. So, if you look at freelancing platforms like Upwork or Fiverr, much of the competition live in countries outside America. And because of the currency differences, USD is worth a lot more to those outside America, allowing them to place their hourly rates even lower than those who live in the US.

Freelancing is an incredibly risky business to sink your teeth into, but it can reap a great reward.

# Pro: No time commitments

High school students don’t have the option of working a full-time job, because they are already fully-invested into school. This is another reason why freelancing is so amazing is because it doesn’t require any time commitments.
Freelancing is incredibly flexible. You can only gain as much as you work, making it perfect for high school students who don’t have too much time each day.

Here are some of the differences between freelancing and working a job:
* Freelancing
  * You choose what projects to work on
  * You choose how much you get paid
  * You choose when you work
  * You choose how long you work for
  * Quit and join the freelancing community as you please
  * Work from anywhere
* Job
  * You must work the number of hours required
  * You must work within a certain time range
  * Superiors assign you tasks
  * Some jobs may require you to come into their office for work

As a high school student and freelancer, you have the flexibility to place your freelancing duties around your school schedule, while still making time to spend with your family and friends.

# Con: It’s very limiting

Freelancing is very flexible, but at the same time, it’s very limiting. It is flexible in the sense that you can work on whenever you want, wherever you want. But, in terms of the work you will be completing, it’s very limit, and here’s why:

## There’s nothing new to learn

Clients who hire you as a freelancer expect you to be an expert at whatever you’re doing. They don’t have a designated amount of time where you can learn how to use a certain technology or learn a new concept. In this context, freelancing doesn’t allow you to learn new things because you will be working on projects that exploit your strengths and not your weaknesses.

## It’s not an outlet for creativity

You are not an employee of your client’s business. You have no control or influence over anyone within your client’s business, so you have no right to object to certain decisions, request new features, or add your own personal twist on the project. You are simply a freelancer that has no affiliation with the company besides your temporary outsourcing service.

## No real career growth

Besides work experience and monetary benefits, freelancing is not a platform to help you grow your career. It may be a stepping stone to something bigger, but it is certainly not a career that will make you rich, famous, or extremely successful. There’s no doubt that freelancing will stick around, as it poses as a major benefit to businesses and individuals around the world, but it will never be more than that.

# Conclusion

Though freelancing may seem like a risky business, there’s no harm in trying. High school is the time where we can explore our interests and jumpstart our careers, so what better time to try freelancing than in high school? There are many roadblocks in freelancing, and chances are you won’t be successful in the first few weeks or months. But, if you stick with it, some success is bound to come, and that will automatically put you ahead of almost all of your peers.

This was not meant to encourage or discourage anyone from freelancing, but simply to show the reasons why it could be beneficial or detrimental. I simply gathered every reason why freelancing is a good and bad idea and presented it for you to decide.


Guide for First-Time Hackathon Goers


Hackathons are a great way to build something cool whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned programmer.

If you don’t know what a hackathon is, it’s a 24-48 hour competition where competitors ideate, build, and pitch a project underneath a certain theme that organizers set for the entire event. Hackathons are super popular, and it’s now gone international. Especially with the current pandemic, there has been a huge uproar in online hackathons, allowing people from around the world to attend these events as long as they all have internet connection.

Now for people who have attended hackathons before, this may not apply to you. But, for the people who have never attended a hackathon before, I’d love to give you some tips on navigating your first hackathon, what to do and what not to do to make it a great first experience!

## 1. Don’t stay up the entire time
A lot of first-time hackathon go-ers always stay up the whole entire event. Especially if the event is > 24 hours long, you definitely want to get some sleep in the middle of the event. This is a mistake that I and many other people I know made because you feel like you need to optimize every minute. But, not sleeping really takes a toll not just on your health, but your focus nearing the end of the event which is really bad since you need to present to judges and run audits.

**So, make sure you get some sleep, because you’ll need it nearing the end of the event.**

## 2. Spend a lot of time on the presentation
The presentation/pitching part of each hackathon is probably one of the biggest parts of the event that competitors overlook. It’s a hackathon, so you should be focusing on building it and nothing else right? Well, that’s true if that’s all you care about, which is completely fine. But, if you are competing to win, you need to set a good 3-4 hour chunk of time nearing the end of the event to focus on your presentation with your team. Though the project you build is important, the way it is presented to the judges is super important.

Being a judge myself, I can say for sure that we have to watch **a lot** of presentations. I don’t have the attention span to sit and watch boring presentations for 1-2 hours straight, and I’m sure it’s the same story for other judges. But, when I see a presentation that’s well designed, executed, and presented, it catches my eye, and it sinks in my head during the judging process and actually makes their project look better than it actually is.

**The presentation is crucial to winning hackathons, so give you and your team enough time to execute it well.**

## 3. Continue projects after the hackathon
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen people start their project on an idea and foundation that’s so strong and stable, and yet, never continue their project after the hackathon to make it better. What you have to realize is that 24 hours is not enough time to make something good. At the end of the event, your project will probably suck with a bunch of bugs, vulnerabilities, and missing features. But, if you continue to work on it after the event, it could be a major addition to your portfolio, and maybe even become a startup!

One of my best projects, Ano.js, started from a hackathon that I won back in November 2019, and worked on it for another 5 months after the event had ended. But, if I hadn’t worked on it after the event ended, it would’ve just been another cool project that no one uses.

**Continue projects after the event - that’s what brings the most potential.**

## 4. Enjoy the event
In the end, hackathons are a fun event. You won’t lose anything if you don’t win, a lot of the times there’s no entry fee, and there’s nothing on the line except winning prizes. It’s important to actually enjoy the event, meet new people, attend workshops, learn something new, etc. Don’t just go for the prizes, or the clout you get when winning. Hackathons can bring about amazing opportunities that are completely unrelated to the actual event, so make sure you’re alert for it. For example, I’ve been offered positions at startups, met great people and mentors, and made connections with other competitors and sponsor ambassadors.

**Make sure you enjoy yourself and the event, don’t just focus on winning.**

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## Last thoughts
Just be sure to keep in mind that winning or participating in a hackathon is not that big of a deal. Some people like to do it to put something on their resume, but it should be an enjoyable experience. Even though it is considered a competition, the best results come out of it when you don’t treat it as such. Treat it as a fun event to meet new people, learn something new, work on new projects, add to your portfolio, and maybe win something cool :)


Hours Officially Acquired By Fiveable


It’s official - **Hours has been acquired by Fiveable.**

After almost 6 weeks of negotiating, planning, and due-diligence, the acquisition offer presented to me has closed once and for all.

Though it’s really exciting news, I’m not going to talk about the specifics of the acquisition - you can read about that on Fiveable’s blog [here](https://hi.fiveable.me/post/fiveable-acquires-hours-to-bring-virtual-study-rooms-to-students).

**Instead, I want to talk about the journey of this acquisition, from start to finish.**

### Feb 8 &#8212; Lead Generated

Back in February, we were doing a lot of cold emailing. We were emailing teachers from all around California, seeing if any of them would be willing to recommend Hours to their students, and many of them did!

One particular teacher, who shall remain unnamed, was partnered with Fiveable, and recommended that I reach out to them for a potential partnership. And with that suggestion, I did exactly that. I sent over an email to Amanda, the CEO of Fiveable, and waited for a response.

### Feb 23 &#8212; First Call

After hearing back from Amanda a couple weeks after sending my introduction, we were able to hop on a call. I felt so privileged to be able to pitch my project to such a notable entrepreneur, and after demoing the product and sharing my story, it felt so good to hear that she was impressed with my work.

After the call, there were so many questions. I had brought up an idea of a partnership between Hours and Fiveable, but nothing more. I was unsure of where it would take us, so all I could do was wait.

### Mar 18 &#8212; Second Call

A long time wait, but finally another step forward. This time, I had a call with Dylan, the Head of Product at Fiveable. 

We talked through many things - the origin of Hours, our current impact and metrics, and some casual back-and-forth conversation about career paths in general. And yet again, it felt so good to hear that my work with Hours was notable from a very experienced veteran in the world of product and engineering.

I walked away from this call optimistic about the potential between Hours and Fiveable, but still had no idea what the possibilities could be.

### Mar 25 &#8212; The Offer

Looking back, I would have never expected this.

I had gotten an unusually fast reply from my last call with Dylan, and was offered another call with Amanda. I wasn’t informed what the call would be about, but I was excited to see what would happen.

All I can remember is talking about the potential that Hours and Fiveable could have together, and how we could collaborate. I was highly doubtful of what could sprout between us because of the difference in scale - we had hundreds of users and they had hundreds of thousands. Why would they possibly want to work with us?

And then, the offer was made.

**“We would like to acquire Hours.”**

Hold up. Are you kidding me?! The fact that an established, reputable startup wanted to acquire a project built by a high school student was unreal.

To be more specific, it was an acquisition in which Hours would join Fiveable to be grown into something more than it currently was. A crucial detail was for me to join their team to achieve just that, for the magic of Hours doesn’t just come from the product, but the creator. Hours truly is the epitome of “built by students, for students”.

My mind was racing after the call. I was unsure of what I should do, if I was ready for something like this, if it was worth it, and even why they were even interested in acquiring Hours.

Despite not having a clear idea of what my decision would be, I decided to move forward with next steps: due-diligence.

### Mar 30 - Apr 22 &#8212; Due-Diligence

It’s one thing to look at a product and say, “I think that would be a good asset to buy.” But then comes the part where you need to take it apart, look inside, and look for any weakness possible.

What’s it built with? How did you structure it? What are the metrics? How’s the retention?

Question after question came rolling in, and I needed to assure the Fiveable leadership members that this could be a plausible transaction.

If you didn’t know already, I’m an overthinker. I was sweating bullets for these 2 weeks wondering if they were going to change their mind at any point in time. No one could say anything to give me any sort of affirmation, not even Fiveable themself.

It was tough to have so much waiting time between due-diligence meetings, not understanding what they truly thought of Hours, and what kind of future they saw for it. All throughout this process, it was so hard to keep seeing my peers build up their startups and grow them without worry, while I kept waiting for an acquisition offer that I was still unsure of to solidify.

### Apr 23 &#8212; First Decision

Finally, after 3 weeks, a contract appeared. 

Well, not 1 contract. **5 contracts.**

Amanda hopped on a call with me to explain the situation. Because I was a minor, there were a lot of legal issues and liabilities that came along with that, and they needed to make sure they were protecting themselves to not jeopardize themselves in the future.

Though it was completely valid of Fiveable to take these precautions, the terms of this deal were completely flipped upside down, in a way that my family and I couldn’t accept. We had to re-negotiate these terms with solid contracts instead of our original letter of intent, so not only was it going to be harder than normal, but our lawyer fees were about to skyrocket.

### Apr 24-May 2 &#8212; Re-negotiation

Toughest part, hands down. I had never negotiated on something this big in my life, so I was super stressed. I was impatient, frustrated, and scared that all of this time and effort on both parties was all for nothing.

Everything was changing. Terms were re-negotiated. Guidelines were added and removed. This deal was so close, yet so far. I had contracts in my hand, but yet I couldn’t sign them.

### May 3 &#8212; Closing

Finally. After all the hurdles and all the obstacles, I had 5 contracts in front of me, ready to be signed. And let me tell you, it felt **so** good to write the last signature on the last document. 

So much weight was released off my shoulders. I had experienced insane amounts of happiness, sadness, anxiety, stress, and frustration throughout the acquisition process, and it finally felt like I could breathe again.

Though I knew that it was going to be a stressful week of integration and preparation for launch on behalf of Fiveable, I was optimistic for the future.

## Taking a step back

Before this acquisition, there were so many unknowns. I didn’t know if it was possible to grow Hours into the gigantic platform that I had envisioned, or if I had the skills and knowledge to execute on my future vision for Hours. At the end of the day, I’m just a 16-year-old kid with big dreams and work ethic. Working with Fiveable on this provides so many resources to actually take this vision and turn it into a reality, all while learning from some of the smartest minds in edtech.

Throughout this whole acquisition, I learned something very important: **patience.** I’m not the most patient person in the world, and the mind of any 16-year-old kid will be immature to some degree. It was hard to have so much waiting time between hearing back from lawyers, redlining documents, and generally just pushing back on terms that might cause the entire deal to break.

I was able to learn that everything always tends to work out. Though you may really want results now, we all must just stay patient and faithful that things will work out. And if they don’t work out, it just means that something even better is coming in the future.

It’s easy to say that this truly has changed my life. Despite all the money, clout, and credibility that’s come out of this, my perspectives have completely changed in the best way possible, and I’ve learned things that many people don’t get to learn in their entire lifetime. I’m so grateful to God for this opportunity, and I will not let it go to waste.

## Acknowledgements

I could’ve never done this alone. So many people played a part in this acquisition, all of which with my best interest in mind, so I wanted to give them a huge shoutout.

First and foremost, I want to thank my parents, specifically my mom. She helped me read every single contract, send every email, and analyzed every situation. She taught me about legal transactions, mitigating risk, trade-offs, negotiation, and possibly every single aspect of this acquisition that I was unfamiliar with. And all of this without asking for anything in return - something only family would do.

I also want to pay a huge thanks to Amanda, and the whole Fiveable team. They were super supportive, empathetic, and kind towards me during this whole operation. Amanda was very sympathetic to how a big decision like this could affect someone that’s still pretty young, so she always held my best interest in mind and made everything as easy as possible.

Finally, I want to thank my mentors and advisors: Vincenzo Marcella, Don Morton and James Bender. As very highly-accomplished entrepreneurs/engineers who’ve been in my shoes before, their advice and guidance was priceless, and it really helped shape my perspective of this acquisition as a whole.

There were so many other people that played a huge part in this acquisition, so I thank you all! This was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I’m so grateful that I was lucky enough to experience it.


Hours Is Now Fiveable

 

As of January 31, 2022, Fiveable has officially pivoted to adopt Hours as its new core platform and vision! After much planning, redesigning, and amazing team collaboration across all departments, today we’ve finally launched the new version of Fiveable. Read more about our official announcement [here](https://hi.fiveable.me/post/virtual-study-rooms).

Since I started Hours in October 2020 and as of January 2022…
* 🙌  91k students have signed up to use the platform
* 🤓  322k study sessions have been created and used
* ✅  4.3M tasks were created within study sessions, and 2.5M of them have been completed overall
* 📧  14.2M messages have been sent between students on Hours
* 🕗  Hours has facilitated millions of hours of productivity!

When Hours was initially acquired back in May 2021, we had the vision to keep it as a separate, yet supporting platform to Fiveable, and provide the utility of productivity to students just as it had been doing.

The whole idea of this pivot came up in October 2021 when the co-founders of Fiveable pitched it to me. It completely shocked me, and I had many mixed feelings. On paper, this was an amazing opportunity. Not just would our entire time start to focus solely on the crazy idea I had long ago, but we would have all our funding, resources, advisors, and investors backing it. But instead of feeling overjoyed, it felt off. I felt like this wasn’t what I had signed up for when I initially sold Hours, and it was definitely a change that affected my role greatly as a PM.

I expressed this greatly to our leadership. I knew that if we went through with this pivot but nothing changed on my end, I wouldn’t feel good about this entire pivot and feelings of regret would haunt me for a long time. To my luck, Fiveable has one of the best people cultures I’ve ever seen, and generously worked this issue out with me.

As of November 2021, I officially joined Fiveable’s leadership as Head of Special Projects, broadening my scope of work while still remaining very flexible and arbitrary. Working alongside our new Head of Product, we’re looking to make some **very** big changes to Fiveable to improve the experience for all of our current users, as well as new ones.

Looking back, I never would’ve thought that Hours would grow to what it is today, and what it will be in the future. Even after the acquisition, I would’ve said the same. Hours initially started out as a small brain teaser project that I was planning to abandon after a day or two, but somehow it spiraled into something so much more than that.

I’m so grateful to be leading this new vision alongside everyone at Fiveable and [having tremendous support in doing so](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6894099834907754496/) to help make an impact on millions of students around the world. It’s not the direction I expected, but I’m excited for what’s to come.

How do I get started in programming?


If you take a look at a huge group of different programmers, each person's experience and learning methodology differs from a lot of others significantly.       

Some might have taken online classes in their own free time, some of them built foundations through Roblox or similar gaming sites, and some of them  took classes in school.

However, no matter where you begin or where you end up, no matter if your desire to program is purely professional, purely passionate, or somewhere in the middle, learning to program will give you the same couple of things: an altered, more logical view of the world, confidence in yourself and your abilities, and a new, highly applicable skill that will help you just about anywhere you go.

## What is even is programming?
Programming is defined as the process of designing and building an executable computer program to accomplish a specific computing result. To put it even simpler, programming is just talking to the computer in a language it can understand. Coding languages can seem intimidating, littered with numbers, parenthesis, and other characters incomprehensible in the etymological context. However, in a way, learning Python and learning Spanish are the same. Once you learn the rules and develop a basic vocabulary in the language, the rest is pretty simple.

Just like anything else, the speed and ease at which programming is mastered is proportional to the investment. This does not mean how much money you spend on your online course, though. Mental engagement is the key to developing an understanding and fluency in your chosen language and skillset. This doesn’t necessarily mean programming is your life’s calling or even a major hobby. It does mean that you have to **WANT** to learn it. If you’re somehow not enamored by the elaborate capabilities of modern technology, the power of artificial intelligence, the precision of robotic surgical tools, or the capacity for Google to sort through billions upon billions of digital mediums to find relevant materials to your random 3:00 AM muling in seconds, there are still plenty of other incentives to engage that driving desire towards programming.

In an increasingly digitized age, especially with the recent global challenges preventing much of the face-to-face, old-fashioned communication your grandparents reminisce about, programming will further your life. There’s no doubt about that. It is applicable in every profession, traditional or novel, and even if it isn’t used on a day to day basis in your specific occupation, it will be a glamorous addition to your resumé. Not to mention, it’s always fun to flaunt your coding abilities to your friends, family, and colleagues. Additionally, as aforementioned, it will improve confidence and problem-solving abilities. These two skills are salient when applied to any discipline of life.

## Where can I learn programming?
There are obvious places to learn like at school or at a bootcamp, but here are some online resources you can use as well:

**Udemy**  

Udemy is a service offering virtual programming courses on a plethora of languages and skill sets, ranging from 3-50 hours. There is an instructor and a syllabus-style learning environment deemed highly effective by its users. However, it does have a fee. Each course requires an individual payment, but does have a money-back guarantee within 30 days of purchase. If the course does not fit your learning style or isn’t teaching what you expected, there’s no monetary loss.

**Codecademy**  

Codecademy, on the other hand, is a self paced resource to begin learning any language for free. There is a catch, though: you can only go so far without switching to a paid membership. If you do not have the means to pay for a coding course, it can still help to build a foundation, and if you do, this may be a great resource for you. However, it does require self-discipline, as the structure of your programming education is completely in your own hands.

**FreeCodeCamp**  

FreeCodeCamp, as opposed to the previous two, is a completely free service. It is not nearly as popular, but does offer a gamut of helpful resources to begin the coding experience.

**1Academy**  

1Academy is a free online platform that curates the best content from the Internet into engaging courses that anyone can take! 1Academy offers courses in music production, philosophy, design, etc. But specifically, it has tons of courses on different programming languages, frameworks, and technologies to dip your feet into an take a look! Check it out here: [1academy.org](https://1academy.org)

## Which technologies serve which purposes?
Different programming languages and frameworks help serve different purposes in different applications - here is the breakdown:

**Websites**
* HTML/CSS (Frontend)
* Javascript
* React.js (Frontend)
* Angular.js (Frontend)
* Vue.js (Frontend)
* Node.js/Express (Backend)
* Python
    * Flask (Backend)
    * Django (Backend)
* Ruby
  * Ruby on Rails (Backend)
* Java
  * Sprint Boot (Backend)
* C#
  * .NET Core (Backend)

**Mobile apps**
* Swift (iOS)
* Java (Android)
* Ionic (React/Angular/Vue) (Cross-platform)
*  React Native (Cross-platform)

**Desktop apps**
*  Java (MacOS & Windows)
* C# (Windows)
* Swift/Objective-C (MacOS)

**Game development**
* Unity (C#)
* Unreal (C++)

**Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence**
* Python
  * Tensorflow
  * Keras
  * PyTorch
  * OpenCV

-------

In the end, it is up to you to find the language that fits your interests and applications best!

Written by Katie Li, edited by by me.


How To Escape Tutorial Hell


Ever been trapped in tutorial hell? It is the absolute worst place for beginners starting out in software engineering to be, and yet so many people get sucked into it.

This problem only arose to me when a friend of mine, Anthony Kuang, reached out to me for help. He was struggling with being stuck in tutorial hell, and I gave him some advice. A question arose in my head, “How many other people are struggling with tutorial hell as well?”

# What is tutorial hell?
If you’re unfamiliar with what tutorial hell is, it is a phase of learning where the victim is dependent on tutorials and direct teaching and stays that way. Those in tutorial hell are incapable of learning new topics and technologies without help from others or a guided tutorial. Tutorial hell is like quicksand — if you don’t escape fast, you will just be sinking deeper and deeper into it.

I have nothing against tutorials, I love tutorials! Many software engineers, including myself, have jumpstarted their career learning from tutorials and online resources. Though tutorials are great, one flaw is that it never challenges you to think for yourself. Tutorials are amazing tools to learn from and get started, but remember, it is only a tool. Tutorials help you learn concepts you wouldn’t be able to learn on your own, but it will not teach you everything you need to know. You could take a tutorial on everything you could possibly need to know to land a job as a software engineer, but somewhere along the line, you’re going to have to think for yourself. If you can’t think for yourself, be creative, and solve problems on your own, you won’t get anywhere in software engineering.

# Why do people get stuck in tutorial hell?
Tutorial hell is notorious for sucking in beginners in software engineering because tutorials are a fundamental way of learning. But there are two big reasons why people get caught and stuck in tutorial hell:

## People think tutorial hell is how you learn
Though they may not know it, some people truly think that tutorial hell is how you learn, so they willingly go from tutorial to tutorial, building boilerplate projects. This isn’t their fault, they just were never taught better. But, mimicking an instructor’s code and thoughts is not productive or smart. It limits creativity and doesn’t really teach you anything if you never think for yourself.

## People don’t care enough to escape
Some people just don’t like programming, and that’s fine. But, this doesn’t just apply to the people who don’t want to continue down the path of software engineering. This also applies to the people who want a career in technology, but don’t want to put in the work to really master their craft. Learning is never easy, it’s really hard to start to understand something you’ve never encountered before. But, if you’re not willing to put in the work to truly understand what you’re learning, either quit or get off your ass.

# How can you escape tutorial hell?
The part we’ve all been waiting for. There are many things you can do to escape tutorial hell, but these are three things I did to avoid tutorial hell altogether, as well as escape it for anyone trapped in it.

## Play around with the code
In the middle of the tutorial and you learn a new function, method, or framework, pause the tutorial. Look at the code you just wrote and tinker with it. Change numeric values, write quick scripts on the side, and modify the code as a whole to see how it changes. This will help you understand the code on a deeper level and the active thinking will help the concept drill deeper into your brain. This is one of the easiest ways you can avoid tutorial hell altogether. This forces you to think on your own and observe the changes that occur when the code is changed.

## Build milestone projects
At the end of each tutorial or at certain milestones within the course, I strongly encourage everyone to build a project or a mini-project using the technology they just learned. It forces you to truly think on your own, think creatively, and solve the problems on your own. Don’t follow a tutorial for this project (that defeats the whole purpose), but instead use what you learned to build something that you can call your own. I can say that some of my best projects were built right after I learned how to use a new framework or tool. It not only helps you learn the concept deeper, but it adds to your portfolio!

## Teach someone else
When you teach someone a certain concept, you need to know it well enough to be able to explain it in your own words. This really gets your brain going, and helps you learn better and faster. I know personally that when I’ve taught others certain concepts and topics, I come out of it understanding it better than if I hadn’t. It’s a really great way to solidify and validate your knowledge of the subject, and will, in turn, help you escape, tutorial hell.

Tutorial hell is not fun. You feel like you don’t know what you’re doing, and you feel powerless to stop it. I hope I provided some insight and helpful advice to those struggling with tutorial hell, and how to escape it. The most important thing to keep in mind when thinking about tutorial hell is to never give up and to really be passionate about what you’re learning. If you don’t care enough about what you’re learning, you’re never going to take the extra effort to understand it.


January 2022

 

[January 2022 photo dump](https://app.myrecollect.com/memory/61f8c92ed95c100016b4eba9)

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Hello! Before I start, I’m excited to say that I will start writing reflection blogs like the one you’re reading right now every month. These reflections are meant for me to look back on everything that happened in the recent month, think about what I’ve accomplished and failed at, and put out my updates for others to read. This was inspired by my good friend [Ellen](https://xuellen.com/), so shout out to her!

## Personal updates

So far this year, a big focus of mine was on personal development. Not through deprioritizing professional goals, but rather optimizing my free time each day towards personal development.

A big new skill I learned this month was how to skateboard! Around mid-January I got hooked on getting an electric skateboard, and I saw it as a good challenge to get myself away from the desk and learn new skills. I won’t tell the whole story now because I’ll probably write a blog post about it soon, but let’s just say it was a success 😉

**UPDATE:** Read the full skateboarding story [here](https://calix.dev/writing/skateboarding).

Another goal for myself was to explore more and spend more time outside. Whether I’m working, eating, or sleeping, I’m always at home. One of my comfort zones is staying at home, so I’ve been doing my best to break it through challenging my lack of spontaneity and exploration. I met up with a handful of friends for lunch/dinner throughout the month, relocated myself to work in coffee shops a few times a week, and have purposely gone out of my way to explore various cities, areas, and parks around me. I even spent a night at UC Berkeley with all of my friends and it was one of the best experiences of this month.

On the academic side, I was able to finish my school semester 10 weeks early, so I’ve been going through January without any schoolwork whatsoever. I also finished all my college applications and completed my college interviews with Babson College and Northwestern University.

Finally, I’ve been aiming to become increasingly more self-aware. Specifically, I’ve been trying to monitor my energy levels during phases of unproductivity and creating ways to combat it efficiently. As I mentioned in a [previous blog post on procrastination](https://calix.dev/writing/procrastination), I sometimes go through cycles of hyperfocus and then burnout, which usually results in hours of scrolling and YouTube binge watching. So when I become tired, I’ve been trying small things like playing an exercise-centric video game, riding my electric skateboard around my neighborhood, or changing my work environment to relax my mind a little bit. So far, it’s been pretty helpful, and I think I’m continually getting better and better.

## Professional updates

Professional development this month was a bit of a rollercoaster. I was strongly fueled by disappointment from early action college rejections in December and determined to improve myself from a career standpoint.

First off, I joined the On Deck Edtech (ODET2) fellowship mid-January and we officially kicked off our 2nd cohort. My fellow fellows are all world-class Edtech operators and investors hailing from Coursera, 2U, and Skillshare, and it’s mind-boggling. One of my fellow cohort members even used to be a middle school principal.

On the topic of Edtech, this month I published 2 articles on [Edtech Insiders](https://edtechinsiders.substack.com/). I never formally announced that I became a guest contributor to this publication, but I started around mid-December and have been loving it ever since. I published an article about [apprenticeships as a work training strategy](https://edtechinsiders.substack.com/p/guest-post-are-apprenticeships-the) and also one about [premium course platform providers](https://edtechinsiders.substack.com/p/how-do-premium-course-platforms-differ). I’ve also been working on a super exciting article about the implementation of VR and immersive experiences in education, and it’s just about ready to publish 👀

This month has also allowed me to get back into writing personal blog posts. I had to take such a long break from writing these blog posts last year because of college applications because it was creatively challenging to write these posts alongside college essays. With college applications out of the way, it felt like the perfect opportunity to continue creating personally-fulfilling content for others to read. In fact, this is the third day in a row I’ve written and published a blog post, and I hope to keep up the pace into February.

Finally, as of January 31, Fiveable has officially adopted Hours as its new core platform and vision for the foreseeable future by launching our newly redesigned platform! This pivot will allow us as a company to be more streamlined in our internal operations, feature development, and resource allocation. You can read more about this story in [my last blog post](https://calix.dev/writing/hours-is-now-fiveable).

Overall, this actually isn’t everything that I’ve been up to this month regarding my professional career. I’ve been working on a lot of stuff behind the scenes that will be kept secret for now, but hopefully it will all be announced soon.

-------------------------------

Thinking back to when 2022 started, I remember being super scared. Whenever the new year hits, I always find myself worrying about time. 12 months seems so short and 365 days feels like it can pass by in the blink of an eye. With January done and the year being 1/12 over, time feels like it’s flying.

One thing I’m extremely proud of is living with no clear direction. I used to be a control freak, always planning everything out and ensuring that I know where I’m going. In these last few months, especially January, I’ve been traveling through life without any particular long-term goals or direction. I don’t know what I want to do with my life or what a desirable career path looks like. The only rule I’ve set upon myself is to ensure that I take each day to work hard on something, and make sure I’m constantly making some sort of personal and professional development. That way, I know I’m making progress even if I don’t know where the path ends.


July 2022

 

[July 2022 photo dump](https://photos.app.goo.gl/Lh9NRajPApxDpjto8) 

-----

Last month, I wrote my [June reflection](https://calix.dev/writing/june-2022) 2 days late. Didn’t think I’d be any later than that, but here we are, on August 5th. It’s always kinda crazy to think about how much time has passed each time I publish one of these.

The first half of July was comprised of travel. From July 3-14, I attended the Atlas Fellowship summer program in Berkeley, which I recently published a [blog post](https://calix.dev/writing/atlas-fellowship) about. It truly was the best program/camp/fellowship I’ve ever been a part of. The experience as a whole was unmatched.

Immediately after, I flew directly from Berkeley to San Diego, where I was attending [1517 Fund’s summit](https://www.1517fund.com/post/1517-summit-escape-from-captivity). They were nice enough to reimburse me for most of my travel expenses and my entire hotel stay for a few extra days before the summit started. Better yet, I was rooming with three of my friends, and it was a blast the entire trip. Though we only had 2 full days in San Diego, besides the summit, we got to go jetskiing, walked around downtown, hit up various restaurants, and just had a blast.

Coming back from San Diego, I was actually scheduled to live in SF with some startup friends for a week, but I decided against it. I’m definitely introverted, and so the recent travel left me exhausted. At that time I was only left with 4 more weeks to spend at home before I left for college, and I decided to prioritize my family and close friends. I also fell slightly sick after those two trips, giving me another reason to spend time at home. I spent my days working from home and using up the last of my WeWork membership before it expired.

Shortly after coming back from these trips, I also started to have different feelings about college. For the past few months, I was always stoked to go to school. New environment, new people, new opportunities. Those reasons and that excitement still hold true. But, I’ve slowly become a little scared. What if something goes wrong? What if I don’t like it there? What if college isn’t for me? Moving away from my home and family seemed a lot scarier, a sudden change in lifestyle was suddenly apparent, and I realized such a big change in environment can induce opportunities to be knocked off track by bad habits and bad influences. 

To combat this and prepare a little bit, I took a good look at the systems and habits I enforced in my life and I improved them. I created new systems for reflection, self-checkins, and tracking my progress in areas of my life I wanted to maintain and improve. I started to plan out tangible action items that I could take the moment I arrived on campus. And I talked about these fears with others and allowed them to shed their own perspective and advice. I’m definitely not completely at ease, but some things you just can’t plan your way to comfort. I’ve done almost all I can to prepare, now all I must do is step on campus and figure it out for myself.

Finally, to end off the month, I attended Contrary’s annual retreat for 2022 **in the middle of the woods**. From what I had heard, their retreat last year was held in San Francisco near Salesforce Tower, with everyone dispersed across various hotels and Airbnbs. It was really nice to get away from the noise of everyday life and just enjoy the company of the people around me. I was lucky enough to join Contrary’s community last month in June, which was technically past the deadline to RSVP for this event. Regardless, I was permitted to go, and it was a pretty sweet experience. All 300+ of us took buses from SF up to the mountains and spent 3 days together in the woods without any internet connection. I got to meet a handful of people I knew online but never in person, and made a bunch of new friends from all around the country. 

-----

July was full of adventure, but also full of reflection. I’m so grateful to have been a part of Atlas, Contrary, and the 1517 Fund summit. But I’m also grateful for my family, my home, my friends, and my life. I don’t regret prioritizing my personal life over the events and opportunities I missed. 

It’s crazy to think that the world around me won’t be my life the way it has been for the past 17 years. I’ve lived in the same city my entire life, and I know this place so well. And though I will visit this place again, I know I will probably never live here the way I have been. Soon, it’ll be time to say goodbye and start a new chapter. I can’t wait to share what I learn over the coming months.



June 2022

 

[June 2022 photo dump](https://app.myrecollect.com/memory/62c0afd672494c0016461555)

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Yep, I know, it’s July 2. I usually try to start writing these on the last day of the month and publish them on the first day of the next month. But honestly, I was so busy that time escaped me. Today’s the last day I can write this before I have to leave home for a little while.

So… let’s get into it.

------

I promptly started this month with a huge hit of one of my favorite feelings: nostalgia. I found out from an old friend that my elementary school was holding a short reunion and inviting all of the graduating seniors of 2022 to come back for a little while. I originally wasn’t invited, but I snuck myself in there. It was an unreal feeling to reunite with people that I only vaguely remembered from so many years ago. I got to revisit my old classrooms, old playground spots I used to hang out in, and reminisce on old memories that I had at this school. I knew I would probably never get the chance to meet these people again, so I particularly cherished these moments.

The day after, I attended my school’s Grad Nite at Six Flags. My school isn’t really that prestigious or well-known, so out of all the seniors that attended the event, my school only provided about 6 or 7 people, with all of us have never met before. Can’t complain though, it was super fun to ride rollercoasters and eat food at like 3am. 

The day after, I was scheduled to hop on a plane to LA to meet some friends, but I wasn’t even sure if I was going until the day of. Considering that I had slept at 5:30am from Grad Nite, I wasn’t particularly motivated to head to the airport. But… yolo. I flew from SFO to LAX in the afternoon and finally reunited with my good friend [John Yang](https://www.johnyang.xyz/). He and his family were nice enough to house me for a few days, so I spent my time around Santa Monica and Malibu rather than downtown LA.

After coming back from LA, I only had a few days before my family and I left on a trip to Hawaii. It was honestly more of an adventure than a vacation. We spent our trip kayaking, hiking, surfing, snorkeling, boating, and a bunch more. I was constantly amazed by the sunrises and sunsets - almost every night I saw the sky turn from blue to gold. And the weather was impeccable - I’ll never forget that Hawaii breeze that’s readily available 24/7.

The day after the long travel from Hawaii, I attended my high school graduation. I mentioned it in my April reflection, but I technically graduated back in April and received my final transcripts months ago. But, high school graduation is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so why skip it? I did the graduation things I never thought I’d be able to do, being an online school student: I walked on stage, I got my diploma, I moved my tassel, and I threw my cap. Though high school ended months ago for me, it hit me again that I’m no longer a student… for now.

------

If I’m being honest, the words I wrote in this reflection did not accurately reflect my month the way my previous reflections have. A big part of it has just been my crammed schedule these past few weeks, but also just the fact that many of these moments couldn’t be properly put into words. I’m so grateful in hindsight that I captured these moments through photos, videos, and audio messages, many of which are better appreciated privately and weren’t attached to my photo dump.

June helped me take a break from my daily responsibilities and truly grounded me in moments that will last forever. I’m so thankful to everyone who made this month amazing.


Learning Through Difference


I enjoy playing tennis.

Wait. Calix enjoys things other than tech, business, and entrepreneurship? Absolutely.

Recently, I’ve started playing tennis with a new friend. To keep him anonymous, we’ll call him Sam.

I used to play tennis competitively on the national level, and now I play recreationally. Even though I’ve spent a lot of time playing tennis in my life, I’ve never really resonated with other competitive tennis players. They only talk about tennis, nothing else, which gets kinda old after a few hours. It’s no offense to them, just my personal opinion.

Sam is one of these people.

He’s around 3 years older than me, and he loves tennis. All he does is play tennis and focus on school. And if I’m being honest, on first impression, he’s not someone I would consider to be super academic or career-oriented. Just by the way he talked, thought, and carried himself, I assumed he was just an average college student looking to enjoy life.

But I was wrong. He’s a super avid student who cares a lot about the grades that he gets and the future of his academic path.

When talking to him, I decided to try something new.

In tennis, you take breaks multiple times within the match. On average, around 9-10 times. 

Sam didn’t know anything about what I did outside of tennis. All he knew was that I used to play national-level tennis and that I did “a little bit of programming” on the side. I tell that to everyone.

I decided to take this as an opportunity to learn more about Sam as a person, and what kind of mindset he lived by.

All I did was ask him questions, and it was pretty interesting to hear what he said.

----

Me: “Where are you going to college?”

Sam: “UC Riverside. Graduating 2024 with a double major in bio-engineering and statistics.”

Me: “That’s cool. Why those majors specifically?”

Sam: “I don’t know, I’m pretty interested in biology, and statistics is a useful skill to have in general.”

Me: “What are you planning to do after undergrad?”

Sam: “I’m going to try to get an MBA.”

Me: “Why do you want to get an MBA?”

Sam: “I want to start a business. I don’t want to ever get a 9-5 job.”

Me: “Why do you need an MBA to start a business?”

Sam: “Because you need an MBA to start a business. Duh.”

----

If I’m being honest, I’m in the same boat. I don’t want to work a 9-5 job for a large portion of my life - I want to run businesses and build startups. 

I think that this shows that in most cases, going through the regular school system in an environment that may not be super driven provides misconceptions. You definitely don’t need an MBA to start a business. In fact, most of the founders I know don’t have MBAs, and those who do don’t even run businesses.

----

But moving on, I decided to change the topic:

Me: “How are your final exams going?”

Sam: “Pretty good. I need a 93% in statistics, a 97% in biology, etc.”

Me: “Why do you need those scores?”


Sam: “So I can get an A in all of those classes.”

Me: “Why do you need an A? Isn’t an A- okay as well?”

Sam: “Nope. An A- equates to a 3.7 GPA. I want a 4.0 GPA”

Me: “Why do you want a 4.0 GPA?”

Sam: I want to get Suma Cum Laude.”

Me: “Oh that’s awesome. Why do you want Suma Cum Laude.”

Sam: shrugs “I don’t know. Bragging rights?”

Me: “Is that the only reason? Does it help with getting a job or graduate school?”

Sam: “Nope. It’s literally useless.”

Me: “But if it’s useless, why do you want it?”

Sam: “I don’t know to be honest. But I want it.”

----

I’ve always been raised with the idea that you don’t do something unless there’s a goal/meaning behind it. Whether it’s because you’re forced to do something, or you have a passion to do something, there should always be a reason why you do it.

Even the fact that he didn’t want such a high-achieving academic award for future academic opportunities like graduate school was surprising to me. 

Then the focus shifted towards me.

-----

Sam: “So what are you up to?”

Me: “Just finishing up my last few assignments for the school year.”

Sam: “Are you taking any AP classes?”

Me: “Nope.”

Sam: “What did you get on the SAT/ACT?”

Me: “Didn’t take it.”

Sam: “Where do you want to go to college?”

Me: “Maybe Stanford or UCLA?”

Sam (in a pitiful voice): “Those schools are really competitive you know?”

----

Judging without full context. He’s not the only one at fault, we’ve all done this before. 

I didn’t find this offensive. It was actually kind of interesting. It makes you think if you could’ve been ranting about a problem to someone, but if you only knew more about them and their background, they could’ve been the one person to provide a solution for you.

----

So, why did I even write this blog post? It’s just a bunch of small lessons learned from a random conversation. But, I think the true lesson here isn’t from the dialogue, but from the general scenario.

**We all can learn something from anyone.** It doesn’t matter if you’re talking to a billionaire or a toddler - everyone has different perspectives and experiences that we can learn from. Whether it’s directly or indirectly, listening to what other people have to say and what their opinions are can help us expand our own knowledge.

For example, I was able to indirectly learn from Sam what kind of opinions a normal student who’s gone 12 years of public education has. I’ve been sheltered in an online homeschooling program since I was in 6th grade with parents who’ve encouraged me to learn and try new things.

**Different lives can give different perspectives.**


Less is More


*TLDR; Today marks the day I launch my [new personal website](/) (v6.0), with a completely different feel and voice behind it.*

---------------

I value simplicity a lot. In the day-to-day, I enjoy taking long rants and explanations that people throw at me and simplifying them into 1-2 sentence summaries. In my work, I like being as straightforward as possible and constantly being focused on finding the simplest first step towards a solution. Throughout the various teams and companies I’ve worked in, I’ve always tried to integrate a culture of simplicity into everyone’s way of thinking.

A few days ago, I was scrolling around my Twitter feed, and my attention was brought to an old friend’s personal website: [Samson Zhang](https://samsonzhang.com). Samson is one of the best builders I know, so I checked out his personal website and saw that it had been revamped. It was clean, comprehensive, and accessible. Every word and element held meaning, drawing the right amount of attention. 

As I continued scrolling, I realized I wasn’t happy with my own personal website. I’d stopped looking at it often, and found myself preferring to read my blog posts on a Google Doc than on my website. There was just too much visual noise, and it wasn’t satisfying to even look at it anymore. As much as I’ve been an advocate for “keeping things simple”, I hadn’t implemented that principle into my own visual brand yet.

I wanted to make a change, and this motivation couldn’t have happened at a better time. I was attending a business conference in Las Vegas at the time, showcasing many hours of content that I’ve heard before. It was the perfect opportunity to work on this new project.



I started by pointing out the clear issues with my old website. It clearly showcased that “more is more”. When I built [my old website](https://website-v5.vercel.app/) (v5.0) for the first time, I was constantly searching for ways to add visual flair. I placed transitions, animations, and unnecessary elements everywhere. I utilized a dark blue and a piercingly-bright green as my colors, and as intriguing as it was, it was flashy, distracting, and visually inaccessible most of the time. All of this drew people’s attention away from what mattered: the content of the website.

I decided to go with a minimalistic style for this new revamp. I removed all of the unnecessary animations and transitions. I decided to not even use a coloring system. I only used a mixture of different shades of gray, and an occasional splash of a bold yellow so it wasn’t just a black-and-white design. For fonts, I used a pure serif-serif font combination to bring a theme of classiness and cleanliness to the written content. I also had a plethora of new photos that had just been taken, so I made sure to use those as well 😉

With my visual guidelines in place, I then focused on the website content. A clean visual design means nothing if it’s cluttered with messy, compact content. Since minimalistic visuals will drive viewer attention to the content on the page, I knew that **every word I typed mattered**.

I pondered for a while. There were a million more things that I wanted to add to my website. As I continued looking for inspiration, I remembered a friend of mine, [Rishi Kothari](https://rishi.cx). 

If you’ve never seen Rishi’s website before, you need to. He took storytelling to the next level, showcasing one of the most minimalistic, yet creative designs I’ve ever seen. Using **expansive text**, a viewer could explore his website from 18 words into paragraphs of interesting content. Through linking specific keywords, words could turn into paragraphs, and show more information about terms that the viewer was curious about. 

It’s psychologically proven that humans with value something more if they must take an action to unlock it. Expansive text leverages this perfectly, allowing user actions to unlock information that the reader will be more engaged in reading and internalizing. Using this, I was able to preview only the most important pieces of information and allow the less-important details to reveal themselves without overwhelming the viewer with information.

---------------

Overall, I’m extremely proud and happy to see how my personal website and brand have transformed and improved. I not only completely revamped my personal website, but also my [resumé](/calixhuang-resume.pdf). It’s crazy to think that I finished all of this over the course of just two days 😂

![Website: Old vs. New](/static/less-is-more/website.png)
![Resume: Old vs. New](/static/less-is-more/resume.png)

---------------

Finally, I just wanted to acknowledge both [Samson Zhang](https://samsonzhang.com) and [Rishi Kothari](https://rishi.cx). Samson is an amazing builder and designer, and he indirectly inspired me to undergo this project, As you can see, I definitely took a lot of inspiration from his web design. Rishi is one of the smartest software engineers I know, regardless of age. As I asked Rishi for permission to implement expansive text into my own website, he was kind enough to share his technical implementation of the feature.

I’m extremely happy with how this all came out, and though a post like this wasn’t really necessary, I hope that this thought process of “less is more” in visual design can inspire others to not make the same mistakes I did.


Lost


I don’t like getting lost. It’s filled with uncertainty and generally a waste of time. I could be spending that time working or getting to the destination I was initially heading to in the first place, but instead I’m lost with no idea what to do.

The last few weeks have been feeling like that for me - I’ve been pretty lost in a career-sense. 
With the recent acquisition of Hours, I’ve had a lot more time on my hands. With summer break starting, the only time commitments I have is my position working at Fiveable which is part-time, as well as a fellowship I’m participating in, and neither take up any time on the weekends. 

Though I've been working on a new startup venture that’s still in stealth and private, that kind of huge shift in time management really had a mental impact on me.

Basically, I’ve been feeling very lost. My stealth venture doesn’t show much promise and things just don’t seem to be moving. It’s sucking up quite a bit of my personal capital, and a lot of questions are circling my head about my next steps.

All of this confusion and time alone has created an insane amount of unproductivity. This unproductivity has turned into a lack of fulfillingness. And that has inevitably resulted in me not feeling so great about myself and what I’m doing.

**Relax, this isn’t just a sob story post.**

I think as time has gone on, I’ve realized that it’s okay not to be doing anything solid all the time. It’s okay to just **explore**. Finding new interests and opportunities is the only way you can grow - you can’t grow just by staying where you are and making progress in one place.

In light of this, I’m exploring a new industry that I’ve been interested in for quite a while. I’m expanding my horizon to new fellowships, internships, and opportunities from amazing startups. I’m writing more content on my blog to share my story and save my memories.

At least for me, it’s really easy to miss all of the blessings I’ve been given that’s right in front of my face. I mean, I’ve done things I could’ve only dreamed of a year prior. It’s always good to look to the future with a growth mindset, but we also need to take time to appreciate what we have. It’s selfish to only think of what we want in the future and not appreciate what we’ve been given.

I’ll admit, the main inspiration behind writing this blog post is because I wanted to vent these emotions I’ve been struggling with. Being lost is something that everyone will probably have at some point in their life, and I just hope that my experiences so far can help someone else.

If not, at least it’ll make for good memories to look back on.


March 2022

 

[March 2022 photo dump](https://app.myrecollect.com/memory/62467a3f5e07490016254fc9)

------------------

Hello there! Good to see you again. The first 3 months of 2022 have officially passed, but I’ve been in so many meetings lately, that all I can comprehend is that Q2 is now starting.

March was a very special month for me. The first two months of this year have been long. My days were filled with work that only brought results through consistency. I spent most of my time alone, continuing to maintain my habits and make progress on my personal and professional work. March was truly a rollercoaster - I’ll show you why.

Just like previous months, I was happy to spend a weekend at UC Berkeley. Though I wished I could’ve visited more, it was so nice to see all my friends and attend a few events. I snuck into a student social between Berkeley MET and Berkeley GMP and got into the group photo with everyone LOL. I also attended a Berkeley social hosted by Dropout DAO and Balance.io, getting to meet some cool people in startups and crypto. Beyond the late-night adventures and study sessions around campus, I was able to take some time away from friends to explore the city and campus with some of the most beautiful views.

Around the middle of March, I was lucky enough to spend a week in Downtown San Jose for a Fiveable leadership retreat. Before the retreat even started, I decided to arrive early and explore the city on my skateboard. I visited San Jose State University and enjoyed the beautiful campus. I skateboarded around campus, I walked into student buildings, got work done in various libraries, and also ate lunch in their communal area. In the middle of a meeting, I had to evacuate one of the libraries I was working in due to a fire alarm, and had to carry my skateboard down 7 flights of stairs.

Beyond SJSU, I toured a cool interactive tech museum and checked out some interesting monuments. They hosted some really cool humanistic statues, AR/VR experiences, and even a space station simulation game. 

During the retreat, we spent a lot of time inside our coworking space having hard, thoughtful discussions. With so many leadership members living outside of the Bay Area, we were eager to try out new restaurants. We ate Japanese BBQ, traditional German cuisine, Mediterranean food, and also at an indigenous Mexican restaurant. And no offense, but the food and service at the German restaurant was pretty bad 💀

All throughout this month, I went through a phase of life that many dread: college decisions. Flashing back to December 2021, I had my dreams crushed when I was rejected from Stanford, and dedicated myself to working extremely hard on my upcoming college applications to ensure that they went well. Did they? Let’s find out.

Being accepted into a good university meant a lot to me, though I’m in a comfortable position to continue my career without higher education. Finding community in a school of high-caliber individuals and being proud of my school’s prestige were important to me, so I took a huge risk and applied to a heavy amount of reach schools, and not many target or safety schools. My plan was to take an independent gap year if I didn’t receive an offer I was happy with and work full-time. Though it was a solid plan on paper, deep down, I was extremely anxious. I didn’t want to take a gap year.

The decisions started coming in at the beginning of March. I started my decision season by getting rejected from the University of Washington (56% acceptance). I was also rejected from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (38.4% acceptance) and Cal Poly Pomona (64.8% acceptance), schools that my parents graduated from and my sister was accepted into. I wasn’t off to a good start. I was luckily accepted by San Jose State University (67.4% acceptance), UC Merced (84.8% acceptance), and UC Riverside (65.8% acceptance), all good fallback schools but not offers I was particularly proud to adopt. Going further, I was rejected from UC Davis (46.4% acceptance), UC Irvine (29.9% acceptance), UCLA (14.8% acceptance), UC San Diego (36.6% acceptance), UC Santa Barbara (36.7% acceptance), and UC Berkeley (14.5% acceptance). I was also waitlisted at UC Santa Cruz (64.7% acceptance). I also got rejected from Babson College (27% acceptance), an entrepreneurship school, and Harvey Mudd College (18% acceptance). At that point, I was completely demoralized. Though I had some hope in upcoming private university admissions, my morale had sunk through the floor, and it affected my day-to-day mood and thoughts. 

A few days passed, and I received an admission decision from USC. This was a school that I wanted to attend for so many reasons, but I obviously wasn’t confident. After procrastinating for hours and a little encouragement, I opened the decision letter. I was accepted into USC’s Iovine & Young Academy. Absolutely in shock. I found myself celebrating the same way I had seen it on college reaction YouTube videos. It was the last thing I could’ve possibly expected, and it was one of the happiest moments of my entire life. 

Moving forward, the decisions didn’t get better. But it was okay. I was rejected from Northwestern University (9.3% acceptance), University of Michigan (26.1% acceptance), Boston University (20.1% acceptance), Vanderbilt University (11.6% acceptance), Tufts University (16.3% acceptance), and Syracuse University (68.7% acceptance). I was surprisingly waitlisted at Carnegie Mellon University’s CS program (7% acceptance), and also at NYU (21.1% acceptance). Finally, with Ivy League Day being today, March 31, I was rejected from Brown University (7.7% acceptance), Cornell University (10.7% acceptance), Harvard (5% acceptance), and University of Pennsylvania (9% acceptance). 

In total, I applied to 28 colleges, where I was accepted into 4 schools (3 of which were safety schools), and rejected from 21 schools. Though on paper it’s a below average performance, I feel so grateful for the results I received. I made the amazing decision to record all of my college reactions, and will be spending time these next few days editing together a video of all of them. It may not be YouTube worthy, but they’re moments that I’d be ecstatic to show my family and future self.

Overall, I did a lot of miscellaneous things this month as well. I served at my church quite often, I attended a few family dinners in Concord and San Francisco, I worked hard on personal projects, and most importantly, I finished my last high school assignment of my high school career. On weekends and weekdays where I had more free time than usual, I worked hard on finishing my classes early. I recently received my final grades for the semester, finishing with a 3.87 GPA out of 5 classes, and reaching full completion almost 3 months before my original end date. Though I thought I’d be an easy candidate for heavy senioritis, I’m happy that I didn’t fall into that rut.

---------------------------

March has encapsulated some of the best and worst times of my life. I went through extreme highs, and extreme lows. I had some of the best days of my life, and some days where everything was falling apart. I visited new places, I met new people, and I spent time with friends and loved ones. I fought with imposter syndrome, FOMO, and low self-esteem. I reached new milestones, achieved new goals, and experienced once-in-a-lifetime moments. Through the ups and downs of a high school senior and a kid figuring out his career, I’m proud that I endured through everything this month and came out of it with a positive outlook.

I feel so grateful. I’m so thankful that I attend the school that I do. Though it’s not a prestigious school that focuses on setting students up for success in higher education or their career, it’s given me the flexibility to pursue my passions and complete work at my own pace. I’m thankful for everyone who supported me through college applications: my parents, my friends, my counselor, etc. I’m thankful that I was lucky enough to receive an admission offer from one of my dream programs. I’m thankful for my friends and my company for all the fun experiences, memories, and moments that I will never forget.


May 2022

 

[May 2022 photo dump](https://app.myrecollect.com/memory/62966dab702254001601e240)

------------------

May felt like a movie. There was the rising action, the climax, the aftermath, everything.

I started off the month by recovering from being sick the month prior. I was sick for the last half April and it took the first few days of May to fully recover. Luckily my condition wasn’t too bad, but I definitely had a lingering cough.

Shortly after my recovery, I officially ended my internship at Uiflow with a very heartwarming sendoff by my fellow team members. It’s crazy to think that my 3-month internship was extended into a 10-month journey. It’s been a great experience to have been a part of their journey as an organization, and they’re definitely a company to keep your eyes on.

A few days afterward, I went on a road trip to LA with my aunt, uncle, and grandma. We were attending my cousin’s graduation from Loyola Marymount University, and we got to attend the first full commencement and ceremony since the pandemic started. I hadn’t attended someone’s graduation since 2017, so it was a cool experience to be there for the first time in a while.

A week after coming back, my family and I went on a trip to Las Vegas. We were attending a real estate business conference that occurs every quarter in various cities, and this time it was held in Las Vegas, my least favorite city. Las Vegas is really beautiful at night and the food is amazing, but I can’t say that I like any other part of it. We were there for about 6 days, most of it being filled with presentations, networking mixers and dinners, and educational workshops. It was nice meeting many other adults that were thriving in the business, as well as meeting other teenagers that were looking to get into real estate. Beyond the conference rooms, my family and I got to attend a Cirque Du Soleil show, rode the LV Ferris wheel, and even ate dinner with a billionaire. While on the trip, I also took the time to completely redesign my personal website and brand, and I wrote about it more [here](https://calix.dev/writing/less-is-more). On the way home, my mom and I attended a family friend’s quinceañera, and it was super fun to meet everyone and learn more about Hispanic culture.

Throughout May, I was able to get in contact with a company that I’ve admired for a while. I finally got an opportunity to chat with one of the founders, and we ended up prospecting an internship placement for me this summer. I went through a technical interview for it the day I left for Las Vegas, and while I was there, I found out I was accepted for it!

Also throughout May, I was in the running for the [Atlas Fellowship](https://www.atlasfellowship.org/), a $50k summer program for high school and gap year students to learn more about effective altruism. I had worked through the first two stages of the application process in April, and this month I went through the final stage which was an interview. The entire application process is a story that I will publish another day. But, while I was in Las Vegas, I was officially named an Atlas Fellow! Top 5 happiest moments in my life.

When I arrived back home, I forgot that I had a driving test scheduled. It was previously rescheduled a few weeks prior, and I seriously considered rescheduling it again. At that point, I had gone weeks without any practice, and I was really scared because I had a very limited amount of attempts available. If I failed to get my license this summer, I wouldn’t get a chance to get my license until I came back from college. After thinking through it, I decided I would just do it. I figured I would probably do the same now as I would in another few weeks. The details of this story will be published in a different post soon, but I ended up passing! I received my interim driver’s license and I’ve driven alone a few times since then.

This string of victories put me on a high. I was on Cloud 9. But then, I had a major setback. I got sick again. This time, with COVID. I mean, I went to Las Vegas - of course I would catch something from it. It was definitely a major blow. This was the first time I had ever tested positive for COVID, and it wasn’t good. I had some of the worst body aches and fevers I’d ever had, and it tied me to the couch for a few days before I was ready to get back on my feet again. Getting sick again was seriously frustrating because I had just recovered from being sick for 2.5 weeks earlier this month. It felt like I was back where I started, but this time with a different disease.

------------

I’m still sick as I write and publish this month’s reflection. Luckily the severity of it has lowered, but I still have a cough that prevents me from going outside much. It was a real shame that I couldn’t end this month on a positive note, considering all the great things that happened. It’s been frustrating to stay trapped at home and not be able to enjoy the fun things everyone wants to do during summer.

But, I’ve been challenging myself to be more positive. Being sick has forced me to slow down and become okay with just doing nothing. Sometimes, that’s what you need. It was probably what I needed. The trips and new opportunities hyped me up, and I needed to be grounded. 

Everything comes with sacrifices, and staying home is the sacrifice I have to make right now. I’m still so grateful for everything that’s happened so far this month, and this COVID sickness takes away nothing from that. Regardless of this setback, this month has still been one of the best months I’ve had so far in 2022.


My Experience at Urspace Labs 2020 (so far)


Applying to Urspace Labs 2020 was such a great decision looking back on it. Being able to learn more about product design and development here has been such a blast and so informational, that it's even inspired me to learn more about product management outside of this fellowship! But to give more context, I'll take you back to March 2020.

## March 2020
I was looking for something to do in the summer. I had plans of course: renew my internship, take a few courses, and maybe start a new initiative or something. But one thing that I had never done was take part in a summer program that wasn't chosen by my parents. I applied to Bluestamp Engineering (HS engineering program), Leangap & LaunchX (entrepreneurship programs for HS students), as well as a few fellowships for MLH, CodeDay, and of course, Urspace.

## May 2020
I had been accepted into Bluestamp, Leangap, and LaunchX, but rejected from MLH & CodeDay (which was super disappointing).
LaunchX was my dream program - I had seen my friends attend and build their own companies and I wanted to do the same! But let's just say the tuition was not friendly. It was around $7,000 for 2 months at the University of Michigan, and they didn't accept my financial aid application. I decided to research more about it and found that LaunchX wasn't as glamorous as it sounded. Students didn't actually dorm at UMich, but at a local college 1 hour from there. Most companies created at LaunchX weren't officially registered, and most died out right after the program ended because of commitment. After this research, I concluded I wasn't attending LaunchX, and to be honest, Leangap and Bluestamp weren't as good but still just as expensive.
After being accepted, Urspace Labs was my choice! But I didn't know what to expect until we started. (I actually applied as a PM fellow as my first choice but was accepted for engineering, but I won't hold that against them 😉)
June-July 2020 - Urspace Labs!

Once we kicked off the program, I knew that this was going to be interesting. Not because I was mostly surrounded by college students (that's pretty normal for me), but the fact that the group was so small, and that there was such attention to detail. I was amazed at how friendly everyone was, and how cool each of my team members were! This program so far has really shown me that it's not an easy process to ideate new product ideas, and gave me the discipline to actually write out technical product specs and system diagrams so we'd stay organized.

## What I've learned so far
I find the way product management and engineering has been presented to me by the Urspace team is so amazing, because it's seeded interest in me to learn more about product. I'm currently taking an online course for product managers, and I've learned a really cool concept about full-stack web applications, and how the client and the server can actually be separated into separate repositories and even deployed on different platforms, and how a REST API can be integrated to facilitate the communication between them. And looking back on LaunchX, I'm so glad I chose Urspace Labs over that. A few of my friends who are in the virtual program are doing things that I'm doing at Urspace Labs, but at a slower pace, lower difficulty, and higher tuition.

I'm so happy to have my amazing team members Nicole, Jasmine, and Rishik to work with for the rest of this fellowship, and we got super lucky having such an awesome mentor like Don to guide us along the way 😄


My First Fellowship - urspace labs 2020


On June 13, 2020, I committed 10 weeks of my life to a summer fellowship called [urspace labs](https://labs.urspace.io/), led by [urspace](https://urspace.io/).

The backstory behind this decision was actually quite an interesting one, and I wrote about it here, but here’s a few things I learned over those 10 weeks!

--------------------------------------------

## It’s not just what you’re learning, but who you’re learning with
I noticed pretty early in the fellowship that I was not in the same age group as my peers. My peers were mostly upperclassmen in undergrad, new grads, with a few being rising freshmen in college. This was not the first time I had been in an environment where everyone else was much older than me, but because this cohort was so small and tight-knit, it was definitely a different experience.

Surprisingly, I didn’t feel intimidated or scared at all. Everyone was so nice and welcoming, and we had frequent coffee chats with each where we could discuss our team’s progress throughout the program and keep in touch.

This welcoming environment made it super enjoyable to learn more about product design/development. Whether it was through casual chats or weekly lectures, this environment was such an amazing experience that might not be replicated in the second iteration of this fellowship.

**Takeaway:** A bit cliche, but it’s not just what you know, but who you know, and who you’re with.

--------------------------------------------

## You don’t always need to give off an intimidating, professional attitude
Each team in the fellowship was given a mentor, which was a co-founder of urspace. It was such an amazing experience, because each co-founder was so accomplished, yet so young. They were all in their young-20s with full careers in product, design, or engineering started, all studying/graduating from prestigious schools. And yet, with all that professional backing, they were the easiest and nicest people you could ever talk with! Shoutout to [Don Morton](https://www.linkedin.com/in/don-morton/), [Emily Chung](https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilychungj/), [Vanessa Qin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessaqin/), and [Alex Nakagawa](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexnakagawa/) for being incredible mentors!

I met students from Berkeley Haas, UCLA, USC, Cornell, Dartmouth, etc. People from all these amazing schools that me and all my peers gawk at and try to work towards through our HS careers I was able to talk to at any time! And yet, not one person throughout the entire program was elitist or arrogant, and never once disrespectful. Everyone was eager to learn and didn’t use their school or past accomplishments to assert dominance or brag at all.

**Takeaway:** Don’t try to be intimidating or arrogant no matter how accomplished you are, and don’t be scared of those who are.

--------------------------------------------

## Product design comes before product development
More on the technical side, it was surprising how much time we spent not building the product, but instead planning, designing, researching, and iterating. In the 10-week program, we spent over half of it just figuring out the idea, and the rest actually working to build it.
I very much have an engineering mindset, where if I’m not building something I don’t feel like I’m very productive. Going through this kind of process was a struggle to say the least, but opened my eyes to why we focus so much on product ideation/design. If you don’t have a clear idea of what your product is, why it exists, and if people actually want it is super important, and my mentor, Don, can attest to the point that I had wanted to get better at this aspect of building a product from the start.

**Takeaway:** You need to understand your product front-to-back before you write one line of code.

--------------------------------------------

In the end, I’m so grateful for the opportunity to be a fellow for urspace labs 2020, it was definitely an experience. I got to learn so much, meet so many new and awesome people, and even continued my project on the side from the program! Shoutout to my amazing team from the program: [Nicole Chui](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolechui/) (PM), [Jasmine Yee](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasmine-yee/) (Design), [Rishik Lad](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rlad/) (Engineering), as well as our amazing mentor [Don Morton](https://www.linkedin.com/in/don-morton/)!


My Thoughts on High School Hackathons


High school hackathons are great. They allow people who haven't coded before getting their start, people who've already been coding for a while meeting others of the same experience, they allow companies to sponsor and get their name more recognition, and organizers to gain more knowledge on leadership and logistics. Overall, they're super beneficial for everyone, and it's a great way to extend and spread the word of technology to high school students that are prospective CS majors and future engineers.

But, something that's been in my mind since Day 1 has been the high school students organizing these events for reasons other than the benefit of the competitors or their own personal interest. My thoughts on students that pad their resume and college application is one of my biggest pet peeves, but that's an entirely different blog for another day.

Don't get me wrong, I know and have met hugely capable and amazing high school hackathon organizers like Chris Liu ([SRC Hacks](https://srchacks.com/)) and Kevin Wang ([HSHacks](https://www.hshacks.com/) & [Epsilon Hacks]). But, I've seen plenty of high school hackathon organizers who organize these events only to fill up their resume, LinkedIn, and/or college applications. And the worst part about it is that, it works! These people, whether they organize hackathons for clout or not, get into great schools like Harvard, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. At what point does organizing these events out of the interest of boosting yourself in your list of ECs become a bit shallow?

Now, I'm not going to start any drama or call anyone out, because I am in no way trying to offend anyone. I'm connected with many hackathon organizers who are very passionate about what they do, and I'd love to get everyone's opinion on this matter, whether you’ve organized a hackathon, competed in one, or never even participated!


November 2022

 

[November 2022 photo dump](https://photos.app.goo.gl/3Fi1nrouLWk8uSdv5)

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Hello there! Long time no talk. It’s currently… December 11. These reflection posts will probably just continually get published later and later. Finals just ended, winter break just started, and so I’m currently in the car on the way home from USC. Fingers crossed I don’t get carsick.

Throughout the entire month, I got to attend a ton of different events. Not only that, but I also hosted my first event, [Founder Flow](https://partiful.com/e/0VsnbT0JeEexnmcDM0Sx), which was a super exciting experience. I attended various startup founder events around LA with Techstars, Launch House, etc. I went to the USC vs. Berkeley and USC vs. Colorado football games and continually re-witnessed how goated our football team is #fighton. Finally, I attended the [SC Blockchain Conference](https://scblockchainconf.com/) hosted by USC Marshall School of Business along with Blockchain@USC and met some really good people around the Web3 space. Funny enough, the conference was hosted less than a week after the FTX meltdown, so there was certainly an atmosphere of tension. I really started to appreciate the presence of people who inspire me, and saw how the act of bringing people together into the same environment can create some really meaningful connections.

Before I knew it, thanksgiving break came around, and all my friends were funneling out of campus. Instead of going back home to the Bay Area, my family was visiting me in LA, so I spent a few days on campus after the break started. With all my friends gone, buildings closed, and virtually no one on campus, it really did feel lonely. I always regarded USC to be a place full of energy, but it was clear that that energy is and has always been fueled by the people.

Over Thanksgiving break, I spent a lot of time with my family, and finally got a breath of fresh air from downtown LA. Celebrated my birthday a bit early, went to Six Flags Magic Mountain (massive nostalgia), and spent Thanksgiving with all of my cousins, aunts, and uncles. It was a nice change of environment to step away from the day-to-day hustle and take some time to truly reflect.

Coming back to campus, I had a big event to prepare for. An entrepreneurship club that I was a part of on campus was having their end-of-semester Demo Day. I consulted a ton of my friends and upperclassmen on preparing my pitch, refining my pitch, improving my storytelling, and generally making sure everything was executed smoothly. It was an 8-minute pitch with a 3-minute Q&A in a huge USC auditorium, and overall, it went super well. I won the entire competition, got some prize money, and was able to cap my experience off on a perfect note.

Literally the day after I won Demo Day, I got to celebrate my birthday with all of my friends. The entrepreneurship club had a final event, an end-of-semester banquet, and I got to spend the last few moments of the month on my birthday, with all my friends, ending on a high note. Couldn’t have been more grateful.

Over the course of November, the thought of my first semester ending was always in the back of my head. It felt like I’ve been at USC for forever, but it also felt like I had just arrived and now I’m leaving. I want to cherish every moment in college, and though it’s bittersweet to leave, I’m very much looking forward to starting my next semester and finishing my first year of university.


Outsourcing Development Work — Should You Do It?


Almost all companies and organizations involve some sort of tech nowadays. Technology is a booming field that is now extremely important in almost all businesses whether it be a restaurant, a nonprofit, or just a general company. From manufacturing to social services, almost all organizations require some sort of tech. Now, if you are starting or a part of an organization that needs to have some software built, it may be tough to do so if none of your team members are technical or have the skills/knowledge to build something like this.

So, a solution to this problem would be outsourcing your development work. Like any scenario, it’s not my place to say whether outsourcing development work is good or bad, but I definitely want to list the pros and cons of this to help those reading evaluate if this would be a good decision for their organization.

**DISCLAIMER:** The pros and cons listed will vary depending on specific circumstances and situations not covered here, so definitely take the time to think about if these points make sense to your circumstances.

-------------------------------

## Pro #1: Outsourcing is temporary and non-binding
A huge benefit of outsourcing development work is the fact that you don’t need to bring anyone onto your team. No need to give out equity/compensation, no onboarding process, no interviews, etc. Simply find a freelancer or a consulting firm and pass on the task to them and get it finished ASAP!

## Pro #2: Quick and easy
Depending on who you’re outsourcing to, most firms and freelancers work very fast. If you do enough research, it’s quite easy to find the right person/organization for the job to help build whatever your organization is seeking.

## Con #1: High budget
Now again, this depends on where you decide to outsource your development work, but a lot of the times the price you need to pay will be really high. If you need a landing page built, it might be a pretty cheap job, but if it’s an actual software application powering your business or an integral engine for your backend, it will no doubt be a high-budget project. One good rule of thumb would be if it’s a simple landing page or website with no functionality, outsourcing is a good idea if there are more important things to do for your organization. But, if it’s an application that powers the core of your operations or an internal tool that your team members need to interact with on a consistent basis, outsourcing may not be the greatest idea, and I’ll explain why soon.

## Con #2: No feedback iteration cycle
Now, what is a feedback iteration cycle? It is basically a cycle of feedback iteration where clients can give feedback on what they would like in the software that they’re outsourcing. If there’s something wrong with the interface or the functionality is a bit different from what they were thinking about, the developers can make those changes. Now, this becomes a big issue when an app is outsourced. At the core of outsourcing development work, it’s all about building the application with no strings attached. Consulting firms and freelancers do not stick with their clients forever, so if there are bugs and issues that come up, it can only be fixed if those firms/freelancers are nice enough to fix them for you.

## Con #3: Hard to understand the codebase returned
The biggest reason why development work should be outsourced is because no one on your team is technical. So, when the project is completed from outsourcing, all of the code built will be returned to you and you will have complete ownership over it. This is exactly what you wanted though right? You got what you wanted and have 100% ownership over it. But, this might pose a potential issue when something goes wrong with the application, because if you can’t understand the code built, then no one else will be able to fix it unless you figure it out on your own.

-------------------------------

Generally, a good consensus for outsourcing is that if you need something small like a landing page or a website built for your organization, outsourcing is a great idea. You can get it built and designed the way you want it while you and your team focuses on the more important operations. In fact, if your organization needs a custom landing page built, check out my consulting business [WebX Consulting](https://webxconsulting.com), where we’ve already served multiple clients, helping them all design, build, and deploy landing pages for their organizations.

In conclusion, outsourcing is a great concept. It helps businesses move faster, and helps compensate for technical skill in certain organizations. The decision of whether you decide to outsource development work or not is a decision that will vary between different scenarios.


Press


Here's a list of the best news publications I've been featured in!

### [TechCrunch: Hours Acquisition](https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/12/fiveable-hours-acquisition/)

### [TechCrunch: Fiveable $10m Series A](https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/12/fiveable-hours-acquisition/)

### [CBS: Teenage Programmer Creates Internet Study-Buddy Platform](https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/11/27/teenage-programmer-in-east-bay-creates-internet-study-buddy-platform-for-students/)

### [Yahoo News: Fiveable Acquires Hours](https://news.yahoo.com/fiveable-acquires-hours-virtual-studying-122500748.html)

### [Business Insider: Fiveable Acquires Hours](https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/fiveable-acquires-hours-a-virtual-studying-platform-founded-by-a-16-year-old-high-school-junior-1030409076)

### [Morning Brew (Sidekick): Featured Hours, my startup](https://www.morningbrew.com/sidekick/issues/2021/02/22)

### [Authority Magazine: Young Changemakers](https://medium.com/authority-magazine/%60young-change-makers-why-and-how-calix-huang-is-helping-to-change-our-world-4c88a983823f)

### [eLearningInside: My own published article](https://news.elearninginside.com/why-i-built-a-virtual-studying-platform-in-the-midst-of-the-pandemic/)

### [Thrive Global: Interview with Calix Huang](https://thriveglobal.com/stories/calix-huang-be-selective-with-your-opportunities/)

### [OurFuture: Podcast Feature](https://www.tiktok.com/@ourfuturehq/video/6975241083806682374)

### [The Seed: Podcast Feature](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn01JJGoy60)

### [Pleasanton/Danville/San Ramon Weekly: Local News Interview](https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/news/2021/07/05/tri-valley-teen-reflects-on-selling-his-edtech-company-for-six-figures)

Procrastination

 

A few days ago, I had a 2-hour period of hyperfocus between meetings and was crazy productive. Though I was on a roll, that period depleted almost all of my mental energy without me even noticing it. After a small break after that productivity session, I felt completely burnt and tired, and found myself pushing off my handfuls of tasks for later.

Stemming from that, I made this [tweet](https://twitter.com/calixo888/status/1487128445158973442).

!["Procrastination Tweet"](https://calix.dev/static/procrastination/tweet.png)

To be honest, I didn’t expect that it would get much engagement since it was a half-joke, but I was definitely surprised. Many others in the comments assured me that it was normal when I thought that it was an issue that only I had. In fact, some gave really good insight into this phenomenon of “hyperfocus” and the benefit of procrastination. They were perspectives that I had never really considered before. Like, how could procrastination be good?

While I was pondering this, my manager personally DM’d me about it. He told me: those who procrastinate a lot produce the best results. It can help you prioritize your work, and realize that you may not have to do work that you thought you needed to do. Overall, procrastination is a strategy, not a defect. You cannot think while you are producing.

This was such an interesting concept to me, since I commit to never having any sort of free time. If I take breaks, I will leave the house and meet with friends, or I will get back to work. I’ve developed a horrible bad habit of turning to YouTube when my mind goes numb, and that has been my strategy for years.

My manager continued. Everyone needs to find space to think, plan, explore, and execute, all in one healthy cycle. Find your own ways to remove yourself from work and immerse yourself into environments of tranquility to think and wander.

The conversation left me thinking about how I could optimize my daily schedule and routines to make way for more clear-headed thinking. Not only to exercise my creative muscles, but also to avoid pushing myself into hyperfocus states constantly until I burn out.

Obviously, I haven’t figured out how to incorporate a healthier cycle into my own life, but it’s something I’m trying to tackle at the moment. Whether it’s removing some commitments from my life or being more intentional with my free time and breaks, I know that any step in the right direction is progress. One thing I’m planning to do is to spend time working away from my desk and in coffee shops or parks. Frequently going on walks and spending less time in front of my computer when I’m not working.

To summarize, it’s not bad to procrastinate when you’re tired or need a break. It’s also not bad to be in a hyperfocus state. It’s all about how you balance your time between resting, thinking, working, and just living out your life. **We just need to be aware of how we spend the time when we are tired and procrastinate.**


Reflection


A couple days ago it was Independence Day, I got some time to hang out with friends and family in light of such a memorable day. It was a much needed break from stress and worries of work to spend some time and celebrate with those I care about. With that time, I got some time to ideate new concepts, which ended up turning into a deeper reflection.

I was playing tennis with a good friend - we’ll call him Jason. To be honest, we talk more than we actually play, but luckily those conversations are filled with interesting stories, past experiences, and mutual laughter. 

At one point, we hopped on the topic of teachers, and what stories we have from being back in elementary school. Both of us had quite a range of different anecdotes to talk about, but then I asked the question, “What do you think our elementary school teachers would think of us if they saw where we are today?” This question was open to be repurposed for many other people as well: past friends, classmates, and maybe even crushes.

In hindsight, we didn’t really share any insightful thoughts at the moment. As I took more time to think about it, it boiled down to reflection. “Am I proud of who I am today, with the context of who I was many years ago?”

I have my fair share of people I can use for my reflection. To keep things simple: 1 teacher, 1 friend, 1 crush.

In 5th grade, I had this teacher I didn’t like - we’ll call him Mr. Wartborgen (no joke, that was similar to his actual name). He was mean, strict, and slightly sexist towards all of the girls. He made me write letters to my parents when I forgot my homework, rewrite those letters 3-4 times, and even made me stay after class during recess because I didn’t write the date on my science notes (I actually did, he just didn’t see it). 

In 4th grade, I had the only best friend I’ve ever had during my time in school - we’ll call him Ryan. You wouldn’t think we were best friends because we didn’t talk much, but we did everything together. We had 3 different recesses back then, and we spent all of them doing our homework in advance or folding origami. We had a few good memories together, but it never went beyond that. We only became friends in the second half of the school year, and after the semester ended I had to attend another school. To this day, we haven’t seen or spoken to each other even though we probably live within 15 minutes of the other.

In 10th grade, I had a crush - we’ll call her Katie. We met at a coding club that I was pretty active in, and we started volunteering together. I tried to spend as much time with her as possible, whether it was working on similar projects or peer tutoring on a weekly basis. Our dynamic was short-lived, ending after 6 months because I got rejected. It hurt - it happened right before a family vacation and Christmas, and I couldn’t quite enjoy those events as much as I would’ve wanted to.

Why do I bring these people up? These are all people that hold memories in my mind from years prior. More importantly, the Calix that they knew was much different from who I am today. My experiences in computer science, public speaking, and entrepreneurship have shaped what I know, what I do, and how I interact with others.

So, coming back to the reflection question: “Am I proud of who I am today, with the context of who I was many years ago?”

For me, **absolutely.**

Mr. Wartborgen only knew me as a shy, quiet student. Ryan only knew me as a good, loyal friend. Katie only knew me as a high schooler that liked computer science. Some of these qualities still suit me today, and some don’t. At the end of the day, I’m so much more than any of these three labels.

Why did I even do this reflection? Because it illustrates my growth as a person. You could take almost anyone, ask them to do this reflection, and see their growth over time whether it be in maturity, knowledge, skills, etc.

Beyond that, it can be applied to other parts of our lives. Sometimes your growth feels stagnant even when you feel like you’re doing all the right things. Being able to reflect on your growth over time with as little bias as possible can really contextualize your situation, and allow you to see the full picture. Progress will always look small when you visualize it on a day-to-day basis. But, if you take a step back and see the full picture over months and years, even micro-increments of improvements on a consistent basis equate to huge growth.

Now, it’s your turn. Reflect on your life and appreciate all the progress you’ve made. Every time you feel stagnant, lost, or unproductive, do this exercise. It’s easy to miss the big picture when we live and work on a day-to-day basis, so making sure that you can zoom out and appreciate all you’ve accomplished thus far will be a life-long skill.

Rejection


Who likes getting rejected? Raise your hand.

Aha. No one’s raising their hand.

No one likes rejection. You want something, you want it really bad, and it just doesn’t come true. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it’s humiliating, and overall it just sucks. But, if I’m being honest, I believe that rejection can be a blessing at times. Why? **Because everything happens for a reason.**

Don’t understand what I mean? Let me walk you through some of the rejections I’ve gone through, and the outcome of each of them.

**I was rejected from over 300+ internships.** Throughout 2019 and 2020, I was super dedicated to landing internships in software engineering. I wanted to stamp my career with industry experience and enhance my skills in programming with real world experience. But, it wasn’t an easy task. I filled out over 300 online applications for undergraduate-level software internships, and was rejected from almost all of them. Looking back, I was so lucky to land the internships that I did. 

**Why was this rejection helpful?** It gave me a whole new level of persistence. I could’ve found 10 companies that I **really** wanted to work for, apply to those 10, and save myself a bunch of time and pain. Receiving all of those rejection emails hurt a lot, but it gave me the thick skin that I needed to feel more okay with rejection.

**I was rejected from the CodeDay and MLH 2020 fellowships.** Back in the summer of 2020, I applied for a bunch of summer programs. I applied for LaunchX, Leangap, and Bluestamp Engineering, and was accepted into all of them. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend because the tuition was a bit too high, so I turned to fellowships. I applied and was rejected from the advanced tracks in the CodeDay and MLH fellowships, and it hurt, but not as bad as the previous internship rejections.

**Why were these rejections helpful?** If I had been accepted into either of these fellowships, I might have joined, had a great time, and met some really cool people. But, I may not have been able to join the fellowship that I actually did: urspace labs 2020. In this 10-week fellowship, I worked with a team of 3 other product managers, designers, and engineers, and built a product from the ground up with the help of a mentor. That mentor happened to become a long-term advisor, who gave me advice with Hours, my most successful venture. He taught me about different web application infrastructures that gave me the knowledge to actually build Hours as a product.

**I was rejected from Y-Combinator’s S21 batch.** I love Y-Combinator. I may sound like the most typical Silicon Valley founder in the world right now, but I love startups, and there’s no place like Y-Combinator to seek out innovation and massive growth. When I was working on Hours, it was the first time where I felt I had a good shot at actually being accepted. So I worked on my application in the midst of one of the most chaotic phases of Hours’s lifetime as a solo venture, and eventually got rejected. The actual rejection hurt a bit, but what hurt more was that I was turned away without an interview. Two people I knew received interviews and were rejected from those, but it left me in a state of confusion when my startup was at a validated growth stage when they merely had an idea.

**Why was this rejection helpful?** First off, [Hours got acquired](https://www.calix.dev/writing/hours-acquired-by-fiveable). Second, I wasn’t ready to be a YC founder. Looking back, I know now that at such a young age, I wasn’t ready to commit long-term to a startup that had a high chance of failing if we didn’t exit. The network you’re surrounded by and the investments being made into your company at YC were exactly the resources that many startups need, but those were also the things that held you, the founder, liable for sticking with your venture and turning it into a success story.

**I was rejected from zFellows.** If you don’t know, zFellows is a very fast-paced, prestigious fellowship for young founders. Think of it as a mini Thiel Fellowship. I had found this program through someone I knew in my On Deck Catalyst cohort, and the more I read into it, I absolutely loved it. I worked on my application, submitted it, and got an interview. I did very well on my interview, anticipated a possible chance of success, and then got rejected. It sucked and hurt a lot, but what stung more was seeing those around me get accepted into the exact cohort I was applying for - people that I humbly thought I had a better chance then.

**Why was this rejection helpful?** The venture idea that I was applying with turned out to be a flop. Many apply to this fellowship with ideas to validate and not necessarily with a developed product. I had a developed product that I was validating, and it ended up flopping from a financial perspective before ever coming out of stealth. As much as I wanted the name credibility and small but hefty investment from the fellowship, I’m glad to be at the front of the waiting list, ready to have another chance to join the next cohort with a better idea.

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Rejections still suck. But, if you look on the bright side and stay positive, you may be able to see quite a few benefits from those heavy rejections that only protrude regret and sadness. I’ve been rejected from so many more things than the ones that I just listed, but the amount of rejections you have is irrelevant. It’s all about how you take it and come back stronger.

**I believe that our pain is never wasted, and if you take it the right way, it can turn into a blessing.**

September 2022

 

[September 2022 photo dump](https://photos.app.goo.gl/8jGzgTWfXJGVgK8Q7)

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Hello there, and welcome back to my life. September has officially ended, once again reminding me how little left there is of 2022. Feels like the year just started, but now it's coming to a close. Even with me reflecting at the end of each month, it doesn’t make time feel any slower.

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The beginning of September was a great start to the month. I started to get into the groove of my classes a bit more and doing pretty well in my assignments for my standards. I was growing closer to my friends and managing my time well between work and play. I went to fun events, attended the first football game of the season (USC trampled Rice), and also started with club recruiting early.

I was feeling good, feeling happy, but then life threw me a screwball. I ended up losing touch with someone I loved, and it completely threw me off. Thank goodness it was the weekend, because for a few days I couldn’t find the energy to do anything. I wanted nothing more than to fly home and be at home with my family, the only people I felt could support me. But I had to stay, so I dealt with it all myself. It was definitely one of the worst non-physical pains I’ve ever experienced, and it'll probably stick with me for the next little while.

But, life moves on, and it never waits for you. As much as I wanted to throw away all my responsibilities and disappear, I knew I wouldn’t. I went through club interviews and got into the best organizations the school had to offer. I was offered to work on exciting projects within IYA. I attended more events and hung out with my friends each day. On paper, life was great. But inside, it all felt a bit empty. When I was with my friends, it was easy to smile and laugh. But when I was alone, it was hard to hide from my own thoughts. I knew I wouldn’t get over this for a long time, so I found my outlet in journaling even more and writing out my feelings whenever they came about.

For the rest of the month, I kept my life moving. I committed to a few clubs on campus, started working on some interesting projects, and tried to stay afloat through my class projects. My days were frequently filled with meetings with other students for group projects, networking events, and general work I had to do for my various projects. On top of it all, I was one of 5 students appointed to lead IYA’s official mural project and was in charge of helping direct our entire cohort of students in designing and drawing a ~187 sq ft mural in under 2 weeks. It definitely wasn’t hard to stay busy.

Near the end of the month, I had the opportunity to go to Palm Springs for a club retreat and had a great time, growing closer with the people in the organization. Right after, I took a trip to Little Tokyo with my dorm friends and finally got my mind off work and school for a little bit. It was short-lived though, as right after I got massively sick and was confined to my room for the entire week, attending class online while still drowning underneath all my work combined. 

Now, I’m at home. Just a few days ago, I hopped on a plane and came back to the Bay Area. Though it’s only been a month and a half away from home, it feels like it’s been an entire year. Living in a dorm is super fun, but being home makes me appreciate the simple things like silence and alone time. And of course, nothing beats spending quality time with family. Though I’m drowning in schoolwork as we speak with two midterms coming up next week, I finally feel at peace, at least a little bit. I’m flying back to USC tomorrow, but that’s not quite on my mind at the moment.

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I have a document full of advice from my family, friends, and mentors that I read almost every day. On that document, one of the points is as such: “College will break you down so you can build yourself up.” September certainly broke me down, and I’ve been working to build myself back up from that.


Serendipity


**Ser·en·dip·i·ty** (/ˌserənˈdipədē/): the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

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I don’t really like the word serendipity.

I’ve seen it hyped up, misused, and used in the wrong context many times. But, I very much agree with the value it brings to everyone at some point in their life.

Serendipity is commonly associated with luck. But I don’t believe serendipity and luck are the same. When someone is denoted as “lucky”, it usually comes with the assumption that whatever positive outcome came about was purely driven by chance and had nothing to do with the beneficiary. Serendipity, on the other hand, requires that one must put themselves in the way of luck if it will have any meaningful and consistent impact.

What I’m saying is, to encounter serendipity, you must create scenarios for yourself to become lucky. This means constantly talking to people, building relationships, honing your skills, putting yourself out there, etc. To illustrate, let me tell a story.

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It was December 16, 2021. I had just been rejected from Stanford the day before, and my hopes were crushed. I had a long day of meetings ahead of me, and I was dreading all of it.

A notification popped up. On Deck EdTech, a fellowship I had recently joined, was holding a social to help incoming fellows get to know each other. At the time, I was interested in exploring education technology further, but I wasn’t really in the mood to tune in. But I figured, why not?

I hopped into the call and started chatting. I met so many cool operators and investors, hailing from places like Lambda School, 2U, Khanacademy, etc. But, one person stood out. Let’s call him Jared.

I was randomly matched with him to chat, and he immediately stood out to me. He was so knowledgeable about almost every industry in education technology. He exuded confidence in the field, and I was drawn to it. Seeing his credentials afterward, I was amazed to see his many experiences being a product leader in companies like Coursera, 2U, and Skillshare. I immediately connected with him and scheduled a time to chat with him.

Fast-forward a week, it was the night before I was scheduled to meet with Jared 1-on-1. I was focused on writing my application essays to apply to Cornell. With my budding interest in edtech, I was focusing the theme of my application around education technology, and so I was researching what similar resources Cornell had.

In my research, I discovered Cornell’s Future of Learning Lab, led by Dr. Rene Kizilcec. Reading into the research projects that the lab facilitated, along with Dr. Kizilcec’s amazing achievements in education technology, I was blown away, and made them the star of what I was looking forward to engaging with if I were accepted to Cornell University.

The next day, I talked with Jared. I was so excited, and I asked all sorts of questions, some related to specific edtech sectors and others related to career trajectories. He answered all my questions, and I learned so much. He even pre-emptively invited me to contribute to his edtech publication. At the end of our call, we were over-time, but I decided to ask him. “There’s this lab at Cornell called the Future of Learning Lab, and I really want to work with them. Do you think I should ask to be a research assistant?”

I would usually assume that it wouldn’t be possible - I wasn’t even a Cornell student. But, I had historically witnessed a friend of mine become a Harvard research assistant in his junior of high school purely through cold emailing them. I knew it was possible.

Jared’s eyes lit up. Turns out, he not only knew the lab I was referring to, but he even knew Dr. Rene Kizilcec. They were previously co-workers at Coursera, both conducting research together. Not only that, but Jared had received his bachelor's degree from Cornell. He and Dr. Kizilcec were still good connections, and so he offered to make the introduction for me. No way.

It took a while, but after 3 weeks of back-and-forth email chains, I finally got on a call with Dr. Kizilcec. He was so nice and accommodating that it made it easy to talk to him, despite being so nervous. He insisted that I refer to him as Rene. We chatted for 30 minutes or so, and at the very end, I tentatively asked, “Would it be possible to join your lab as a research assistant?” He said yes.

After more weeks of waiting, I finally heard back from him and the lab. I was re-connected with Rene as well as one of his PhD students working within the lab. After a bit of discussion, I was recruited to join one of their research projects, Pathways, to help with some front-end software engineering. I ended up building the main search feature used when we launched just a month ago.

Beyond that, Rene personally invited me to also contribute to an extension of one of his past research projects. It involved curating a list of historical online courses from a range of international MOOC providers and correlating learner performance/results to course information and instructor diversity. For example, does including the word “Introduction” in the course title (like “Introduction to Data Science”) make people who view the course more likely to enroll?

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Serendipity can come in a variety of forms. A job, a mentor, a partner. But these things will only come to you if you make room for luck in your life. You need to understand your goal, take steps to achieve it, and allow serendipity to create opportunities for you.

I feel extremely lucky to have been able to tell this story, and that there are many other examples that I could give in replacement of it. Almost everything substantial that I’ve achieved thus far has included a healthy amount of luck and chance in it.

If you’re ever wondering why you can’t be as lucky or serendipitous as someone else, make sure that you’re always making room for luck in your life. Be proactive, but also live in the moment. It’s also important to be self-aware. If you look in the mirror and practice gratitude, sometimes you’ll realize that you’re luckier than you initially thought.

Skateboarding

 

I’ve never considered myself a skateboarder. I’ve tried skateboarding a couple times in my life, which usually ended up in quitting after a few minutes. I’ve always hated the idea and the feeling of falling, and skateboarding is a perfect way to fall countless times.

Ironically, one of my favorite YouTubers is [Elliot Choy](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaQocIkdhh8TIi56LvLoViA), and the most addicting part of his videos was watching him ride his electric skateboard. Living in NYC, he would ride his electric skateboard around the city, going faster than traffic and getting around quickly and efficiently. It was always so fun to watch him ride his board in his videos, and it always lodged the idea of riding an electric skateboard in my mind.

A few weeks ago, I spent the entire day meeting up with various friends around my city, and so I happily subjected myself to walking around and taking the bus. Just as the sun was just setting, I was waiting for the bus when a girl zipped past me on an electric scooter. Though I had my own electric scooter, I didn’t bring it with me. I looked and thought to myself, “Why don’t I have my electric scooter right now? I could be riding it like her instead of waiting for the bus.” But I remembered that the electric scooter was way too heavy to be taken anywhere. It discouraged me a bit, but then an idea popped up. Why don’t I just get myself an electric skateboard?

I thought about it. I never seriously considered getting myself an electric skateboard because I didn’t know how to skateboard. But at the time, I was extremely burnt out of work, and I couldn’t find any motivation to focus on anything. I figured, why not give it a try?

I got home and did my research. Electric skateboards were priced around $400-500. Though I don’t mind spending money, I hate making stupid purchases. After a lot of thought, I decided that if I could commit to learning how to skateboard, I would buy it.

The very next day, I pulled out an old skateboard from my garage, grabbed my helmet, and went out to my local tennis courts. I watched a handful of YouTube videos on how to skateboard, and braced myself. My biggest fear of skateboarding was falling and injuring myself. So before I started, I practiced falling on the floor over and over. Anyone who was watching me probably thought I was crazy.

I stayed out there for an hour straight, trying to learn how to balance and move around on the board. I got a little bit better over the course of that hour, and I was slightly happy about that progress.

That entire experience was terrifying, constantly being in fear of falling and hurting myself. But, I also saw it as a challenge. I saw it as an opportunity to personally upskill myself in ways that had nothing to do with my regular day-to-day work. I actually sensed a bit of motivation to get better. I knew that this was something I wanted to pursue, so I bought an electric skateboard without any hesitation.

Over the next few days while my electric skateboard was being shipped, I went out to the tennis courts every single day and practiced for an hour. I practiced how to balance and move faster, as well as how to fall properly and safely. It was by no means an easy process - I was constantly anxious of falling, but at the end of each session it felt so fulfilling.

When my electric skateboard finally arrived, I continued to practice, getting better and better each day. I rode it around my neighborhood, to nearby coffee shops, and even rode it around UC Berkeley and the city with my friends.

To this day, I’m still riding my electric skateboard and loving it every time. It’s only been 2 weeks since I started, and I definitely can’t consider myself a good skateboarder. But, I’m continuously getting better and enjoying every moment that I’m on the board.



So, why did I even tell this story?

Throughout my experience of learning how to skateboard, it made me realize that skateboarding requires you to embrace failure. Real skateboarders who do fancy tricks or experiment with crazy stuff on their board have such a high level of bravery and a strong willingness to fail. Attempting tricks or even learning the basics of skateboarding require the open-mindedness to embrace failure - the kind of failure that can leave you injured. Embracing that for myself made me realize that I hadn’t truly been embracing failure in my own life. Though I constantly work to improve and push my limits, it was always in a calculated way where I wouldn’t set myself up for progressive failure. Skateboarding taught me to constantly push my comfort zone in ways that I never expected that I could.

Beyond that, this level of involvement in my own personal development made me realize that my priorities have been screwed up this whole time. Though I don’t really create goals for myself, I’ve always had emphasis on career-oriented intentions that constantly reflect on my actions and thoughts. It’s been a great strategy for keeping a growth mindset and constantly improving myself in various skills and aspects. But, since those were my own real pillars of importance in my life, whenever I had free time, I would always resort myself towards progressing myself professionally instead of taking time to rest or improve in the realm of personal development. Going through this experience of learning a new personal skill helped me understand that I need to have personal goals as well, and ensure that I’m improving as a person and not just as an operator or a founder.

I would’ve never thought that something like skateboarding would have such a collateral impact on my self-reflection. At the end of the day, it’s a skill that doesn’t make a huge impact on my life or what I do on a day-to-day basis besides a micro-increase in convenience. But, if little life improvements can have such a broader improvement, isn’t it worth so much more?


Speaking in Public


A couple days ago, I spoke in public for the first time in 2-3 years.

It’s been so long because of the COVID pandemic, with everything being locked down. All the places I used to speak at were gone, and COVID hit just when I started my journey in entrepreneurship. Though I’m no stranger to public speaking, it sure was nerve wracking. Here’s the context.

I was working on a stealth venture aimed at the Christian community, and after speaking with my youth pastor, he invited me to speak to the whole youth group at my church. It was an opportunity that I accepted almost immediately.

My job was simple: speak for 5 minutes about my project, why it works, and why it would be helpful for everyone in the room. But, there were 2 factors that really had me nervous.

My church invests a lot of money into having an amazing venue and experience for everyone who visits, and it shows. The youth group has a separate auditorium, with vertically-leveled seating, a stage, lights, speakers, soundboards, and a ton of other things. This kind of environment is such a nice one to be in, but it made it infinitely scarier when you were actually speaking, or running the show.

Not only was the environment scary, but so were the people. Being homeschooled, I’ve never been super exposed to regular high school culture. So to me, every single person in my youth group looked like a cool, popular, intimidating high school student. If I’m being honest, this scared the heck out of me.

So I prepared a bunch. On the day I had to speak, I practiced my speech 10+ times, and each time took around 5-6 minutes. I was surprised I hadn’t lost my voice by the time I was actually on the stage.

And…. it went well! Not only was it not as scary as I thought it would be, but the audience was super nice and supportive. I didn’t stutter too much, I remembered my points, and I caught it all on camera. I felt so glad I stuck with it after I finished, and wouldn’t trade it for any other outcome.

To be honest, there’s no “moral of the story” or “lesson to take away”. Though I’ve accomplished quite a bit and done public speaking in the past, I still got really nervous and scared, and that’s okay. I could’ve turned down the opportunity at any point and still been perfectly fine without speaking, but the true benefit didn’t really come from the publicity. 

**What really mattered was sticking to my word, and facing my fears anyways.**



The Art of "Taking a Breather"


**I get emotional sometimes.**

For those who know me, I try to always be as upbeat and funny as possible. I don’t take things too seriously, and like to enjoy things.

But sometimes, life gets stressful. Things happen that aren’t in my favor, and that can trigger a variety of emotions, whether that means anger, sadness, or frustration. Heck, I’m kinda angry as I write this post.

I think something very valuable that I’ve learned is the art of “taking a breather”.

**Emotions are powerful.**

The right emotions can give you the motivation and drive to achieve your goals, do great things, and inspire others. But negative emotions can mess with you, throw you off course, and hurt a lot.

I’m no psychology-expert, or health and wellness enthusiast. I can’t tell you exactly how to help with these emotions, but I can tell you about how it can affect you in your work, and how to “take a breather”.

**Negative emotions can mess with your mind.** 

They can tarnish your focus. They can throw you off track. And when all that happens, you can’t be as productive as you can be if you were in a better state. And relating to people who are sucked into “unhealthy productivity” and feel the need to be productive all the time, you may be feeling these emotions but choose to push through it because you “must be productive”.

I’ve never been the most patient person in the world. I like to move fast, make progress fast, get results fast, and never wait. I like to take action as early as possible, and see results. So, it was never natural for me to take a break when my emotions started to get the better of me.

**What I’ve learned is to take these situations as logically as possible.**

It’s clear that when we’re thrown off by negative emotions, we’re not able to perform at our peak. We can’t think as clearly, process things as fast, or focus as well as when we’re in a happy or neutral state. Basically, we can’t work as efficiently as before.

With that in mind, we can bring up the question, “is this even worth it?” Is it worth it to force myself to work while in a negative state where I can’t work as efficiently, and might drive my mental state into a worse position than it already is? Hopefully, your answer to that question should be no.

**The next thing to do is to “take a breather”.**

Do something else. Distract yourself. Healthily take out your emotions. For me, I would always go out and play tennis when I feel stressed, overwhelmed, or angry. It’s good exercise, it takes my mind off whatever’s bothering me, and helps me collect my thoughts.

Taking these kinds of breaks is really important to sustain yourself, and to not burnout. Burnout comes up much more frequently and hits much harder when it’s fueled by negative emotions. Putting things in perspective and not forcing yourself on things that will ultimately put you in a worse position not only takes awareness - it takes discipline.

And that’s the art of “taking a breather”! Sometimes tough situations have simple solutions - it just takes a little bit of awareness. 

**Emotions are a powerful thing, and it’s important to know how to not only deal with them, but how to react to them.**


The Importance of Networking


Networking is super important. It helps you meet new people, stay connected with good ones, and almost always opens up doors to opportunities you would’ve never gotten without your connections. But nowadays, networking has gotten a weird connotation, and an assumption that it’s only for adults and working professionals. While most of the time this is the case, if we were to drop that stereotype, a lot of young people and students could take advantage of it and boost their career before it even starts.

Now, when I say networking, I don’t automatically mean LinkedIn. There are TONS of other places that people overlook when talking about networking. I’ve networked on LinkedIn, different online communities, in-person networking events, etc. No matter where you do it, networking is networking. Now, I’m not going to talk about **how** to network, but more about **why** you should network, and here’s why:

## 1. You can make lasting connections professionally
This is an obvious one. With networking, quality is better than quantity. And once you focus on quality, you can meet some super amazing and valuable connections! Where you decide to network also makes a difference on what kind of connections you’ll find. Different communities hold different people, and sometimes you’ll meet types of people that you won’t be able to find on places like LinkedIn.

Personally, I’ve met some **amazing** people outside of LinkedIn. For example, communities like Hack Club are filled with amazing software engineers and programmers that are lightyears ahead of me in terms of technical knowledge, and they’re all still around my age! In other networks like TKS, I’ve met some extremely accomplished entrepreneurs and students immersed in topics I can’t even fathom like quantum computing and biomedical research! I’ve met students who’ve had their companies acquired, writing apps that have hundreds of thousands of users, and have special recognition from Forbes, CNN, etc. There are so many places to make new connections even as a high school student, and even more so for those in college.

It’s obviously not just about who you meet, but how you work with them. It’s important to know who would be a valuable addition to your network and who wouldn’t be. I’ve had countless coffee chats and networking calls with people who were super nice and accomplished, but never stayed in touch because I didn’t have time. But, when you do find people that would fit nicely in your network, it’s important to act on it. For example, I met my co-founder for EdTube, [Michael Ye](https://www.linkedin.com/in/realmichaelye/), through a random networking call off of LinkedIn! We stayed in touch and he eventually pitched the idea of EdTube to me after a few calls, and we decided to start working on the idea together at that very moment! But, none of that would’ve happened if we had never stayed in contact.

## 2. Mutual benefits!
This is usually what comes to mind first when the topic of networking is brought up. Why network with people if you can’t benefit from it right? Though I don’t necessarily think that kind of mindset is good, it is worthwhile to point out that mutual benefits from networking with different people is a huge part of it. Different connections can provide you with different opportunities, and you can do the same for them! Networking is usually a good move for both parties, which makes it mutually beneficial! Especially if you decide to network with people in your field/industry of your choice and you’re able to demonstrate your skills and excellence, they might be able to give you a referral to join the company that they may be working at. Even if they don’t refer you to different companies or job positions, they can open up doors to a lot of different opportunities, such as speaking on a podcast, working on a project, or maybe even an event invitation!

Mutual benefits aren’t something that should be the goal of every networking interaction, because more than likely you will be able to benefit from making new connections even if you’re not receiving things like opportunities, referrals, etc. You can learn so many things from just talking with someone else, and learning from their past stories, experiences, and mindset!

## 3. It’s a great experience whether you make good connections or not
You’re not always going to meet valuable connections when networking. It’s like a blind date, you never know if someone is going to be a good fit for you until you talk with them, whether that be in person, over the phone, or in some other way.

I’ve had my fair share of networking calls that didn’t go the way I was hoping, or I wasn’t able to talk to someone that I thought would be a good fit for my network. Even through those calls that may have seemed unproductive to me at the time, I was able to learn something. Maybe not from them directly, but about human behavior in general. I was able to pick up on certain patterns that different people had when I started to have more frequent calls. And, depending on who you are, getting on the phone with someone completely new might be out of your comfort zone, and would therefore be a good challenge for you even if the call goes terribly wrong!

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In the end, I think a good mindset to have when networking is that there’s always something to learn from someone. Everyone is better than you in something, and in that way they can teach you about it and you can learn more. Networking has been able to open doors for me that I would’ve never imagined, and I know many others who’ve boosted their entire careers through networking, and just getting to know other people. It really does tie in with the saying “it’s not what you know, but who you know”. In this context, it’s not just a simple, cliche saying - it’s actually true.


The Misconception About Publicity


I think we can all agree that attention is nice. Though some are uncomfortable with it and prefer it less than others, attention, in a general sense, feels good. Getting recognized for your achievements, receiving praise for your hard work, and having people spend their precious time to listen, look, read, and learn about **you**.

I’m definitely no exception.

Over the last 2 years of learning about computer science, building different software projects, and extending far past my comfort zone, I’ve arrived at a place I’ve never dreamed of - building applications and companies that actually have impact.

Though these applications and companies don’t actually impact a huge amount of people, any achievement you possess is exponentially magnified when you factor in age.

I’m lucky to have gotten my start in my freshman year of high school. That might be extremely early for some, and late for others. But because of this, my achievements have gathered a bit of attention.

This resulted in me getting so many opportunities to garner attention. I was able to jump on podcasts, get interviewed for articles, speak at conferences, and much more.

Now, this is great right? Who doesn’t like to talk about themself? I would be a liar if I said I didn’t, and I love being upfront. And in the beginning, I absolutely loved being a podcast guest, speaking at events, and getting praised for my work.

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But just recently, I’ve noticed how shallow all of this is. Let me explain.

I was lucky enough to record a podcast episode a couple days before this post was published, and it was great! I loved the podcast, the host was super nice, welcoming, and easy to talk to, and we got to talk about my new projects and ideas.

But, just a couple of hours after finishing the recording, I saw on the podcast’s Instagram story that they were already promoting the next 2 guests that would record their episode just 2 days after mine.

Then it hit me: I’m not that special. Though every podcast is different, their goal is always to garner an audience, and sometimes that process is reliant on the hunger for attention from relatively successful people. This principle is the same for every media outlet, whether it be a podcast, a newspaper, an event, or an article publication.

So what did I learn from all of this? **I'm not that special.**

Haha I’m kidding! Sorta.

Everyone’s special. But in the context of media, press, and attention, you’re not that special. Everyone is looking out for their own interests, dreams, goals, and passions. Those closest to you value a lot, but those simply stumbling across a podcast or article written about you don’t.

You need to execute on your own goals for you and those closest to you, not the random people around the world who don’t care about what you’re doing. If you’re a nonprofit, impact those who you target in the best possible manner. If you’re a company or a startup, solve an issue in your customer’s lives and build a business off of it.

But all in all, you need to stay true to yourself, and not let your actions be fueled by something as shallow as attention.


First Principles Thinking


A few weeks ago, I had one of the most interesting conversations of my life.

He was one of the biggest first-principles thinkers I’d ever met. His thought and demeanor was opinionated, assertive, and almost egotistical, yet humble and unassuming. Every question, statement, and opinion he threw at me was holistic, rigorous, and agreeable. Though from the perspective of society his opinions were controversial, in my eyes they were rational.

I absorbed so much from that one conversation, I could describe it for hours. But I walked away from it with one thought: how could I become a better thinker?

I, like many others, have been told to think from first principles. Though I knew the concept, there is a strong difference between knowing and understanding. That conversation led me to truly consider what first principles thinking is and what it looks like in action.


## What is first principles thinking?

First principles thinking is a framework for approaching ideas and decisions to come to optimal conclusions. It requires breaking down our thoughts into fundamental assumptions and principles to deduce what is _true vs. false_ and _good vs. bad_. In first principles, you may think in a way that’s considered controversial or contrarian, but it’s really just organic thinking. It enables your opinionated view of the world to shine into your decision-making, free from societal norms and pre-conceived perspectives. 

The quality of first principles relies on how well we can determine what is either _true vs. false_ and _good vs. bad_. But, answering these questions must be approached very differently.

Determining what is _true vs. false_ is dependent on your **worldview**. Your worldview is simply your unbiased understanding of the world and how it works, enabling you to see what is true and false. How well do you understand the world and its history? How well do you understand the factors of the situation at hand? How much domain knowledge or experience do you have in hopes to improve the quality of your decisions? In a perfectly educated world, everyone should be able to answer what is true and false, accurately and truthfully.

But, how do you determine what is _good vs. bad_? **Your values.**

Determining what is good or bad is purely contextual to who you are. For example, I could ask the same question, “Should I be a startup founder?”, and a _good_ answer could be completely different for two different people? Why? Because those people were raised differently, have different beliefs and morals, have different skills and interests, and have different ambitions for the future.

Your values, and the context of your life, are the key factors in classifying what is good or bad. The decision between what is _good vs. bad_ in first principles thinking always seems to be overlooked for what is _true vs. false_, when decisions between _good vs. bad_ always seem to be the hardest to answer.


## Building your worldview

Your worldview informs how well you can determine what is _true vs. false_ in first principles thinking. You build your worldview through learning and synthesis of the world around you. As described in _Principles_ by Ray Dalio, synthesis is the conversion of data to an accurate understanding. Again, there’s a difference between knowing and understanding something, and synthesis is one of the best ways to start to truly understand something.

The idea of synthesizing information is pretty abstract and self-explanatory, but the golden rule is this: The value you get out of learning is determined by the rigor you put into it. Rigorous thinking and questioning makes synthesis more accurate and efficient, sharpening your information input to be more concrete, direct, and unbiased.

Try visualizing thinking as a [RAG system](https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/rag), where our worldview represents the knowledge base. A polished RAG retrieval system takes in user inputs, synthesizes them for optimal knowledge retrieval, fetches relevant data from data sources, and utilizes that data to generate the desired output. Thinking can be represented similarly: we use situational context (questions, decisions) as input, we synthesize them using rigor and critical thinking, we query our existing understanding of the world, and use that understanding to inform our conclusion.

While thinking can be represented with RAG retrieval, learning can be represented with RAG data ingestion. With any knowledge base, it’s essential to make it accurate and high-quality, being wary of data poisoning or inaccuracy. A polished data ingestion system takes in a large sum of information and synthesizes it by chunking, summarizing, and fact-checking the information before storing it. This idea of information synthesis before storage can be reflected in how we learn and expand our worldview.


## Realizing your values

Your worldview can be built, but values are realized. Your values are invaluable, as they represent who you are and who you wish to be in the future. It’s not as easy as reading a book to discover your values — it requires introspection and feedback from trusted friends and family. Your values can be inspired by many things: religion, morals, preferences on the life you want to live, etc.

Re-visiting the RAG system analogy, your values can be represented as alignment policies and prompts. These policies and prompts don’t necessarily bias the ingestion and retrieval of data in the knowledge base, but they shape the way the output is generated. Though something may be true, it may not be _good _in the context of your values, and your values can override the objective reasoning system in the best interest of the system.

In the picture of the RAG system, alignment policies and prompts are also more thoughtfully updated in comparison to the knowledge base. Knowledge bases update when new information is ingested, but policies and prompts are carefully updated by developers when certain patterns and outputs are observed and considered. This is representative of real thinking: you should learn new things every day and expand your worldview frequently, but your values should be updated thoughtfully through introspection and feedback from the world.

The overall relationship between your worldview and values should be separate. Keeping your worldview as a completely unbiased, objective view of the world creates an understanding that is not necessarily subscribed to, but accurate. Keeping your values as a completely personal, contextual view of your life enables the ability to truly consider oneself in thinking and decision-making without the bias of society. When you keep your worldview and values separate, you can more effectively determine what is _true vs. false_ and _good vs. bad_, and ultimately come to decisions and ideas that are both true and good.


## Moving forward

Changing the way we think is hard because it’s so instinctual. We think and make decisions constantly and changing such a strong habit is no easy task. I initially wrote this post proposing a completely new thinking framework, but I realized that’s too hard to apply.

If you haven’t already adopted first principles thinking, I highly recommend doing so. It’s easy to think the same way as everyone else, it’s hard to think for yourself.

If you’ve already adopted first principles thinking, realize the basic mechanics behind how first principles thinking even works: determining what is true and false, good and bad.

Improve your judgment of true and false through your worldview. Read books, learn history, travel the world, experience new things. Be a generalist of knowledge and improve your understanding of the world every day. Be rigorous in learning and synthesizing your understanding of the world, and be unbiased and unattached in your association to your worldview.

Improve your judgment of good and bad by understanding yourself and your values. Introspect and realize what you value in your life and what you want your life to look like in the future. Be crystal clear to yourself on your values and prioritize them above everything else: your worldview, societal norms, even the opinions of loved ones. Update them thoughtfully as your worldview expands and your life experience grows.

Ultimately, how we think informs everything we do in life. No one can tell you how to think, just how no one can give unbiased thoughts. The most important thing to takeaway is this: **think for yourself**.

Tips For Students Applying As a Software Engineer


Over the last couple of weeks, I've had the privilege of undergoing technical recruiting and conducting interviews for potential software engineers for [Launch Tech LLC](https://www.launchtechllc.com/), which was a very rewarding and fulfilling process, though a bit tedious at times.

Throughout this process, I've been able to notice a lot of patterns that students, high school students specifically, have when going through the recruiting process, whether it be because of lack of skills, experience, or general knowledge of how to properly act in certain professional situations. Either way, I wanted to share it so that whoever is reading this right now can avoid making the same mistakes!

## Not having projects
Projects are the backbone of any engineer, it shows us what you know what you're talking about. Not just random projects or complex projects, but projects that are actually useful and are tethered to your personal passions. There will always be projects that can be improved in terms of design, complexity, implementation, or anything else. But at the end of the day, projects are a good way to recruiters to measure the quality and skill-level of engineers, and those without any projects aren't helping their chances of being recruited, or even being interviewed.

## Writing short essay questions
We received well over 150+ applications for our first recruiting rounds, so we obviously didn't have enough time to read all essay prompts. Though we didn't read through everything, we could quickly see who did and didn't write long essay prompts, and we subconsciously took note of those who didn't take the time to write at least a semi-long essay answer, and it left an impression on us.

## Being overly enthusiastic
Everyone wants an enthusiastic candidate, but those who are over the top are offsetting. I've had people constantly call me "sir" when they're older than me, and sometimes even more skilled or experienced than me. It personally made me feel a bit uncomfortable and weird, to say the least, and that's the absolute last thing you want to make any recruiter, or anyone in general you're going to work with to feel.

Though this was a bit of a short article and there's definitely a lot of things I could've touched on as well, I think that these are 3 huge reasons why I decided to reject so many applicants, and it can definitely be the deciding factor of you getting an interview opportunity, and possibly a future position at the nonprofit/company you're applying to!


Transparency


I’m pretty transparent. Obviously, I have my boundaries. I don’t share very personal info that may put my family and I in physical or legal trouble, especially not online. But in terms of my stories, experiences, feelings, thoughts, and ideas, I’m open with them all.

**But, why?** 

For me, I’m not transparent because of the benefits it provides, though it is very helpful. I’m happy to open up about my past experiences and mistakes because I’m genuinely passionate about sharing my journey. Even if some moments throughout my story are embarrassing or controversial, I share it. There will be people who resonate with my story and those who don’t - the human race has and always will be diverse in terms of beliefs and knowledge.

I love to encourage others to be more transparent with their stories as well. But from a logical perspective, **why is being transparent important?**

**Being transparent shows who you really are.** If you’re transparent with your backstory, beliefs, and opinions, it will allow others to learn who you are on a deeper level than what they may already know. Your work, achievements, and curated personality is what many have seen before, but they might not know about your religious stance, your rough childhood, or your emotional stance. 

For example, I’m a Christian. My family and I have grown up Christian, but it’s not a part of me many people know. It’s a huge part of my life, and I’m not only open to being transparent about it, but I’m driven to share the blessings I’ve received with others.

**Being transparent shows authenticity.** Opening up about who you really are evokes a sense of trust in others. No one fully trusts those who lie frequently, or hide parts of their personality. Being transparent makes you more authentic, for the more others know about you the more trustworthy you are.

**Being transparent provides accountability.** If you’re transparent with your goals, others knowing about it will provide accountability to stick with them. If you’re transparent with your past mistakes, those who indulge in your story will hold you accountable for those mistakes, but not always in a bad way. Staying accountable for your mistakes can help you ensure you don’t mess up again.

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In the end, transparency is a choice. You should never be open with your life to the point where you’ll put you and those around you in danger, but being transparent is beneficial for everyone. Allowing others to learn from your own experiences and mistakes can be very valuable to them, and sometimes a little kindness goes a long way.




Which Programming Language Should I Learn First?


I've been asked by multiple high school students what programming language they should learn first. Now, there are many articles and blog posts talking about this exact subject, but from my perspective of a high school student, I would like to give a direct answer.

In my opinion, the best programming language to learn first would be either Python or Javascript. Why? Here you go.

I learned Python first. The syntax and flow of Python is so simple and straightforward, that I find it even more understandable than block-programming. It's a great way to learn fundamentals, but it is still the \#1 most popular programming language, and has potential in data science and ML/AI, along with options in web development. It is a great programming language to start on and continue in. A lot of people may say otherwise because there are definitely better technologies/languages to use for certain applications, but for a beginner just starting out, it's a great choice to start on.

Javascript is also a great option. It's easy to learn, it's very popular, and it's a very powerful programming language. It is used heavily in web and app development, and it is starting to take over native mobile app programming languages. It is marked as one of the programming languages of the future, and whether this is true or not, I would encourage everyone to learn Javascript at some point in their career. I used to hate Javascript, but after a while of using it, I started to love it! Even this blog is built in Javascript! (Next.js + React)

Whichever programming language you decide to start on is completely fine, whether it be Python or Javascript or something else. Because chances are, you'll be pivoting sometime in the future. I hope this helped somebody who was confused on where they should start and every single article on this topic out there just said "it depends".


What’s Programming Used For Nowadays?


“Programming is cool, but I’m more interested in \[insert different field here\]. Should I still get into it?”

Time and time again, teachers, grandparents, parents, and others have been famous for dispelling the use of technology. But what most people fail to realize is the prevalence of technology in our lives. Even if you don’t personally know how to code or do so much as navigate a website without assistance, software is everywhere. Nowadays, there are barely any fields that don’t include some type of software or technology for enhancement.

And to prove it...

## IT/Computer Science
This one is pretty obvious. This field does not incorporate programming; it is programming. Computer science and information technology are quite literally the field of programming software to create specified results, whether that is in the form of an online program, a hardware function, or something else entirely.

## Scientific Research/Experimentation
Within this field, there are several instances in which programming is helpful. This is typically concentrated in two areas: experimental devices and result analysis. Most devices used today are a form of hardware, and hardware cannot exist without software (essentially programming). In aeronautical science, each individual function of a Mars Rover works because of a pre-programmed sequence describing how the device should respond to each external stimulus. In radiological sciences, the fission and fusion is not done by hand or even hand-operated devices. The human- induced error would be gargantuan! Each device is programmed to release electrons at a certain time and with a certain angle, in a precise manner. On the analysis side, programming can take large quantities of numerical data and instantly graph or plug them into a series of equations. Anyone who has worked with an excel sheet has certainly witnessed that technological magic.

## Math
Although programming is applicable in many areas of mathematics, as coding itself is a mathematical process, the largest element of programming within math is calculators! Calculators are tiny boxes of mathematical code. The original computers were calculators, hence the name.  

## Health/Medical Field
Similar to the scientific research area, most devices and result analyses use some form of programming. Life support is programmed. The medicine dosage rates on IVs are programmed. Pacemakers are programmed. Surgical devices, as aforementioned, are programmed. MRI machines are programmed. The blood pressure analyzers, thermometers, and pulse oximeters used across doctors offices, school nurse offices, and households all use programming. Similarly, each piece of data collected in doctors’ offices is entered in online databases, which, guess what, are programmed!

## Economics/Business
The corporate world is littered with programming. Almost every financial speculation is based on code; the entire field is numbers. However, the greatest case of programming within economics is the stock market itself. The stocks app on your phone is programmed, tracking stock fluctuations outside of that handy app is based in programming, and even buying and selling stocks themselves is a largely programmed interaction. Plus, no one can forget advertising, a staple of the corporate world. There are algorithms that use search histories and (although not proven in most cases) keywords extrapolated from the data picked up by your phone microphone to tailor ads specifically to you.

## Manufacturing
As of the industrial revolution, the manufacturing process, as I’m sure you all know, has become increasingly mechanized. The machinery that builds plastic utensils, crafts car parts, and even makes some of the ready-made-meals you can find in the grocery store are computer-based and hence, programmed.

## Government/Policy
Streaming that presidential debate, the Google search to find Trump’s latest tweet, completing the census on a laptop or phone, and that petition you clicked “sign” on at Change.org are all examples of how programming is used in the political field. Additionally, resources are distributed online, candidates build their own websites to further their campaigns, etc.

## Education
The programming of Edtech sites such as Khan Academy and Quizlet have revolutionized education. Before programming, no class would have been able to hold Kahoots or Quizlet Lives while children screamed “faster” at their partners and claimed misclicks on the day before a big test. Similarly, online grading systems have changed the field. Imagine waiting till the end of the quarter or semester to see your final grades as opposed to the minute by minute updates present in contemporary education. Teacher and school websites, too, have caused a drastically new approach to the entire system.

## Physical Art
While the production of physical, not digital, art is still technology-free (although I’m sure there are instances…), artists have begun programming websites to share their art with the world. Art shows and competitions transitioning online have allowed a greater audience and wider economic outreach for artists, as well.

## Writing/Journalism
Magazines and newspapers converting themselves into online entities has not only saved the trees, but increased the outreach of news. Additionally, youth have received opportunities to program their own websites for their own journals, magazines, or newspapers, granting experiences and an influx of future opportunities. People have also been able to create careers out of blogging or “vlogging,” such that Youtube and Tik Tok are careers rather than hobbies.

## Sports
Despite what many may think, the athletic industry is one of the most programmed of all. The score boards are constantly being programmed and reprogrammed to reflect player/team statistics, respond to penalties or score changes, depict advertisements or player histories, and have a constantly draining and halting clock. In addition to these, the infatuation with statistics and charting almost every movement a player makes uses a great deal of programming. Even still, sports marketing is a growing field. The industry is pretty much made up of teams, programmers, and the occasional broadcaster.

## Fashion/Beauty
This industry, although not the typical programmer’s avenue, is far from left out of the hype. Entire apps and websites have been constructed surrounding matching outfits, makeup tutorials, and skin care regimens. Programming has allowed for sites in which you can “shop” and ‘try on” clothing online through uploading pictures and some bodily statistics. Like other industries also, websites, blogs, etc. have transformed the industry.

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No matter if you identify as a traditional techy, a novice in the world of programming, or even just wondering if you should get into it, programming holds a significant role in society, and it’s definitely worth learning for people in any field.

Written by Elizabeth Field, edited by by me.


Why I Don't Like Working For Others


I know, it sounds bad. Just let me explain.

To start, **there's nothing wrong with working for other people.** In fact, it's crucial to businesses and corporations to fill their team with skilled people to thrive.

But, it's just not for me, and here's why.

**TLDR; I don't like trading my time and effort towards someone else's value.** 

I enjoy working on projects because they're something that make me proud. I love seeing other people use what I've built, especially when I've poured a lot of time and effort into it. My projects are things that I've ideated, built, maintained, and **own.** 

But, when I'm working for something else, it's not quite the same. I'm given an idea that's already been validated, and possibly something that I'm not really super passionate for. I pour my time and energy into this job, but none if it belongs to me. The work I produce has no benefit to me - it's simply trading my time, effort, and expertise for money. Money is important, don't get me wrong. But especially when I'm at a stage in my life where I don't need to sustain myself, my time and energy is much more important. 

I do agree - it's pretty arrogant to trash-talk working for other people without having the experience to back it up. Though it's illegal for minors to work a full-time job, but I do have a similar experience.

Back in October 2020, I accepted a contract project with a consulting firm who was working with a psychiatric center. The details of this project will be relatively generic because my NDA restrictions, but the project was to build a web-based video conferencing platform for the psychiatric staff and their patients. Basically, a custom version of Google Meet.

This was a really daunting project. Real-time video communication is pretty complex with a lot of caveats. No third-party APIs or packages were allowed to be used - everything had to be from scratch. Not to mention, I only had 3 months to build this from start to finish. 

You'd think that the techincal part of this project would be the hardest part, but interestingly not. The techincal aspect was difficult, don't get me wrong. But finding the motivation and passion to actually pour my time and energy into this project was really difficult.

I struggled to commit to this contract project because it wasn't for me. I was pouring my time and energy into something that I would have no ownership for. I had no creative freedom - simply build, get feedback, and iterate. No new ideas, no custom iterations, no passion. I wasn't even allowed to display this project on my portfolio because of privacy reasons. In the end, all of this work was going to be put towards someone else's value, so I dropped the project.

To wrap this all up, I don't like trading my time and effort towards someone else's value. As a disclaimer, this shouldn't change your perspective on working for others, or influence you in any way that may be against your own personal opinions. This is simply how I feel about working for others, and wanted to share my perspective in hopes that similar people would resonate with me.



Why I rejected a YC startup position


Sometimes, great opportunities come at bad times. As much as I wish it weren’t true, that’s just the way things work out occasionally.

To illustrate this, here’s a story of why I turned down a Y Combinator (YC) startup position.

It was with a startup that will remain unnamed that was accepted into the YC S21 batch, backed by YC partners who were the CEOs at Twitch and Yahoo. In just 5 months, they’d grown to 100,000 daily active users, partnered with tens of major social media influencers, and had gone hugely viral on Instagram/TikTok.

They had scouted me out and were impressed with my work with Hours, as well as my journey as a whole, and they were interested in making me their very first technical hire on a part-time or full-time basis with employee benefits and stock options.

Pretty much a dream job for any student interested in startups and software.

So, why did I turn it down?

**The short answer is I was legally bound to turn it down.**

But, there’s a longer story behind it.

I received an email from the co-founder of the startup on April 29, asking for a call. It was such a pleasant surprise to receive it because 1) I had heard of their startup before and really resonated with their mission and product because it flowed so closely to what I had worked on before.

The only issue was… I was in the middle of a production issue meltdown. Things were on fire, users were complaining, so that entire email and proposition completely slipped my mind.

When I finally decided to revisit the email 2 days later, there was another dilemma. I was in the final stages of the Hours x Fiveable acquisition, and had a lot to stress about. I ended up scheduling the call for a week in advance to ensure that I would be able to handle one thing at a time.

By May 3, the acquisition was closed. Everyone was celebrating, yet scrambling to prep Hours for a launch. It was only then I realized that I had signed myself onto a non-compete - a term that would pretty much fully prohibit me from working with this startup.

Fast-forward to May 8, I was on a call with 2 of their co-founders. The news about the acquisition was made public the day before, and apparently they had found out before the call even started. You can probably infer what the atmosphere was: awkward.

I ended up having to turn down the offer. Though it was an amazing opportunity, and I had always wanted to join YC, I couldn’t put my recent acquisition deal in jeopardy because I decided to break a core term in the agreements. Though technically in California (where I'm based) non-competes aren't legally binding, integrity is an important value to hold.

It all came down to what I wanted. Even though I've always wanted to join YC, I'd rather join as a founder, not an employee. 

The moral of the story is, **sometimes good opportunities come at inconvenient times.** Though this was an example of that, I'm blessed enough to have what I have, and I wouldn't have it any other way.


Why Syntax Errors Will Make You a Better Software Engineer


We’ve all been there. You’re coding, and when you run the code, it crashes. You see the error, and it’s a syntax error. Now, most developers groan, and look at the traceback and try to fix the error with no enthusiasm. But, I’ve grown to enjoy syntax errors. I don’t necessarily seek them out and dance with joy when I see them, but I’ve grown to accept them and have understood how helpful they are.

You may be wondering, how in the world can syntax errors be helpful? Sure, in context, syntax errors are not helpful. But what they make you do subconsciously is very beneficial, and I plan to point those things out.
Whatever your stance is on syntax errors, I believe that syntax errors help you become a better software engineer.

# Syntax errors make you more observant

You have to be observant, meticulous, and detail-oriented to efficiently seek out and solve syntax errors. This becomes human nature — if you’re observant, you can solve these errors quickly and easily. But, if you’re not so observant, you really have to look closely and slow down at what you’re reviewing. You must read code line by line, looking at each and every single character just to see what you did wrong. Now, I’m no neurologist, but going through this process over and over again helps your neurons fire, essentially building certain skills. This skill is not something specific towards programming, but skill in general of being more observant and detail-oriented.

Personally, I’ve found that over time, I’ve gotten better at reading my code and other people’s code and finding flaws in it syntactically. I’ve also gotten more observant in general. I’ve started noticing little details that I’ve never noticed before and on a frequent basis. Though being observant may not sound like the most amazing skill in the box, it’s one that’s required to becoming a great software engineer, and it’s a skill that’s used in everyday life.

# Syntax errors make you more persistent

Being observant is not all there is to fixing syntax errors. You need to be persistent. Some syntax errors are easy to find and fix: maybe you forgot a parenthesis or an ending quotation mark, but some are harder to find: maybe you misspelled something or forgot to capitalize a letter. Either way, you probably won’t find the error right away. I’ve spent 2–3 seconds on syntax errors, but also several days just finding that one variable I misspelled. It’s helped me become more persistent in finding errors, debugging them, and fixing them.

A lot of students that I mentor give up way too easily. They call me over the moment they have a syntax error, which is usually a 2-second fix. Though you need to be persistent to fix syntax errors, a lot of the time it’s not that hard to solve.

# Syntax errors will make you more resourceful tool-wise

This may sound a little bit far-fetched, but in the software engineering industry, using the tools around you can improve your efficiency immensely. Things like debuggers, word-searchers, and syntax validators are extremely helpful.

## Debuggers
If you don’t know what debuggers are, they are pieces of software that run inside IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) and some text-editors. They help you freeze time at certain breakpoints in your code, and check the values of certain variables and function outputs. Debuggers are used a lot for logic and operational errors but can help a lot in checking where your syntax error lies and will point it out for you.

## Word Searchers
Something as simple as a word searcher can go miles. Especially for something like a misspelling of a word, you can simply look up the name of the variable you think you misspelled, as see if it exists in the place where you hypothetically misspelled it. I’ve used this to help me fix syntax errors dozens of times, and I feel like it is highly underrated by developers. Sometimes the simplest tools can make the biggest differences.

## Syntax Validators
You may or may not have heard of syntax validators, but they are external resources that can syntactically validate your code and point out errors in indentation or missteps. For example, JSONLint is really helpful for validating JSON code. I’ve used it numerous times when I run into merge conflicts with my JSON files, and it always saves the day.

Syntax validators are not the first tools that I use, but it is a very good last line of defense.

# Conclusion

I hope that I did syntax errors justice. Many developers dread them, but we should grow to appreciate them, and truly understand why they are helpful to solve. It can help improve our skills related to programming, but also skills outside of the field. It has definitely improved my skill and efficiency as a software engineer, and it can definitely do the same for yourself.

For beginners who are taking an online tutorial or in-person classes, try to fix the error yourself. Try to fix syntax errors on your own before calling a mentor or posting a question on an online forum. It will help you understand your code much better, and will, in turn, help you learn a lot more about programming in general.



Why Teaching Kids Has Made Me a Better Software Engineer


I work with kids a lot. I work a part-time job teaching and mentoring kids learning how to code, and I also volunteer at a nonprofit organization to help mentor kids to learn how to code as well.

Anyone who knows me well enough can say without hesitation that I don’t work well with kids. I’m awkward and a little bit shy when working with kids, but I’ve gotten better over the last few months. Over that time, I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten better at explaining certain topics, breaking down hard concepts, and even learned a few new things!
I’ve learned that teaching kids forces you to truly understand what you’re doing, and here are some reasons why I believe this is the case.

# Kids will question you

It is known that a child’s favorite question is, “Why?”. From my experiences, this statement could not be more true. Whenever I try to explain a topic to a student, concept, or piece of terminology, I can never say another word without that student asking me, “Why?”. Sometimes, it’s a simple explanation. But, sometimes it’s a question that leaves me speechless, and you can’t help but question your own knowledge as well.

Students have asked me that question numerous times, and it’s pushed me to research deeper into the concept at hand and fully understand what I was explaining. It has not only validated that I don’t always truly understand what I’m teaching but also pushed me to understand it better.

# Kids don’t understand the topic as you do

You know more than the student. Chances are, if you’re teaching someone, you probably know more about the topic at hand. It’s important to understand that kids aren’t on the same level of knowledge as you and that they won’t always understand what you’re talking about. It’s led me to realize that when explaining certain topics, it doesn’t make sense to the student when I use fancy terminology or vocabulary. Even words as common as “processing”, “network”, or “storage” sound like a different language to some students. The worst part is that kids usually won’t tell you when they don’t understand something. They will continue to listen to you without understanding what you’re saying, making your whole explanation completely useless.
This has taught me to explain terminology when I use it, or to find alternatives to using it. It goes back to truly understand the topic at hand. If you don’t truly understand what you’re teaching, it won’t make it any easier for the student to learn.

# Kids will remind you of what you don’t know

Part of the reason why I was able to land a part-time job and a volunteering position was because I understood software engineering, and was completely capable of teaching kids how to code. But, everyone has holes in their knowledge, and teaching kids has definitely exploited defects in my knowledge. I was once teaching a student basic Javascript principles, and he asked me a question that had to do with how the event loop worked. Up until that point, I only had a vague idea of how the event loop worked, and I wasn’t able to give him a good answer to that question.

It made me realize that I didn’t understand a very crucial concept in JavaScript, and it pushed me to understand it better.
Whether you were teaching a concept you thought you knew but really didn’t, or a concept you had no idea you didn’t understand, teaching kids can show you that you don’t truly understand what you’re doing, and you still have a lot to learn. This is not just specific to software engineering or computer science, but any field. We are all students, and teaching kids is something that’s helped me develop in my knowledge in ways I could’ve never imagined.

