Advices

There are many good advices out there as much as there are great quotes. But I've come to realize that these advices are particularly bad given the different contexts they are given. And I don't mean context of advice but rather context of life as well.

The other day somebody told me. "Win, in a relationship you shouldn't say I love you all the time. It will make the relationship stale and then it won't last", this stuck with me for some time since me and my girlfriend use these words indefinitely almost endlessly.

• But why shouldn't you say I love you all the time shouldn't we express our affection to those that we care?
• But I don't see my parents saying it all the time and their relationship is great so does that mean I shouldn't say it?

Now we can debate whether we should always say I love you to our loved ones. But the point of this post is to understand that some advices might just not apply to you. People have different experiences and they are also at different stages of their lives.

It would be the same to tell a beginner developer to learn VIM motions rather than learn a coding language since that will help them in the long run. Not only does this advice not make sense. But there are also so many factors to consider that the advice becomes poison rather than medicine.

Qualifications of Advices

Does this person have the qualification to give you this advice This is probably the simplest form to gauge advice and one that a lot of people use. But people are often quick to judge and care more about money, status, and age which clouds their judgement.

So how do we determine if an advice is useful? I think this is how my subconscious brain rate a legitimate advice

Context of Experience

Is the person who gave you advice in the position you want to be in terms of this advice? I think this might be the most important indicator of all. If you have to make a north star metric of what qualifies as a good advice, ask yourself if the person you are taking advice from is someone you would want to be in that situation.

And I'm not saying measure their position in things like, wealth, power, status. Although these things are often what we compare other people to. I meant are you taking love advice from friends that are single? Are you taking money advice from people that are as broke as you might be, etc.

Context of Situation

Is the situation of the advice applies to the same situation? Many things constitute this. Some obvious ones to list are:

• Time
• Group settings
• Wealth level

For instance the reason why we might not take an advice from a grandparent is not because of their age. It's actually contradictory since age comes with experiences which leads to wisdom. But why we might not take it is because the advice couldn't be applied to the current times. They effectively have 0 experience in technology compared to modern day kids.

Orthogonally, an advice from someone who works in big tech and engages with corporate politics would only hinder those that are working in a tight knit group as a startup. These advices are only applicable to the similar situation they present themselves in. - Group Settings

Life Nuggets

My girlfriend and I have this discord text channel labeled #life-nuggets . It's a series of timeless quotes we post on the channel whenever we find them. Marked with timestamps and author.

Timeless advices presented in quotes often feels so awesome to me. Being able to give advice that is applicable to life in general is hard. But perhaps the ones we selected all catered to what we feel might make a "good life" and that in itself is another conversation.

SF Chapter

This article marks a new chapter in my life. The working phase! I'd like to say that it's the grinding phase but honestly I've felt that applying for jobs was the grinding part. Or maybe, I've gotten to the point that coding is as much of a personality as it is a hobby or a job.

I've accepted an offer from an AI Startup company called JigsawStack. Another one of my checklist ticked off for the 2025!

HackDavis

Yellow Goggles

I feel like I've been putting off writing my blog for a while that when I start typing up. There are so many updates to go through. So much so that I may have to do another release on another post

Apartment Hunting

New Chapter New Plans

I got a new job offer from an AI startup company called JigsawStack. The team is small and cracked. All of them

Splurging on Dev Tools

First Paycheck

What's something you've changed your mind on in the past year?

It's been a couple weeks since I started my first job. It's a Software Engineer Position at a startup. I hate to admit this, but my experience here led me to believe that it doesn't require a huge amount of technical skill to build a product with paying users. Especially for your early adopters, users pay for a product they believe works.

And this is where I was fooled. As I trust that most developers also commonly fall into this trap. The trap of building a perfect product so that not only the users will trust us but we ourselves can trust the product in which we are building and selling to them. The perfect UI, UX, backend architecture, system scaling etc.

Developers often try to take the path of an Inventor since that is what engineers do, we invent, scale, and inspire not only ourselves but other people to the allusion of futures.

But I think in a startup instead of taking the path of an Inventor we should in a way also take up the role of a Magician. Users will pay for a product they believe will work. And in the early stages of a startup where you don't have the funding nor the time to spend on creating the future, sometimes a mix of illusion will help tip over the edge.

• Maybe from the perspective of a normal users this all looks the same. The product acts as intended and thus beliefs are solidified.
• Maybe that means that we developers should try to fool ourselves. I know this is often hard since we understand how the product works as a whole, and it's hard to sell something that we know is inherently faulty.

Ultimately, my goal this year is to build a product that users will pay to use. And sometimes that means fooling myself into believing in a work-in-progress user-validated solutions rather than begging for users to try out a fully built solution that no one has a problem to.

Start of 2025

New Year New Resolutions

To me, resolutions have to be impactful and measurable. This avoids the goals like "I want to get healthier" or "I want be a better listener" and make me set clear, actionable, ACCOUNTABLE goals.

Last year's I achieved 2 of my 3 resolutions. That included:

• Build a real world product that people would use
• Join more groups and learn better leadership skills
• Choke Yimin out in BJJ

I haven't seen Yimin at the BJJ Gym since the new years...

Anyway, New year, new resolutions! Here's what I thought of:

• Get a tech job! (Six Figures)
• Get someone to pay me $1+ from a product I built myself
• Write a consistent blog for 2025

First Interview

Starting off the year strong, I interviewed at 2 start ups based in SF! In 2024 I had an interview rate of 100% (meaning I passed 100% of my interviews. Albeit that I only got 3 interviews XD).

This year I'm not so sure. My interview question was implementing every possible way of TicTacToe (similar to this). I bombed it. Did not understand the problem at all nor did I get any proper solution out. T^T. It's ok, chin up, and I now know what needs to be fixing.

Second interview went well. There wasn't any technical question yet but the founder asked me questions about resume, my history of building, technical struggles etc. He was trying to get a feel, if I was a great fit for the company or not. I was fairly confident, since I did build these things and I've always enjoyed talking about the technical complexity and areas of tech.

2024 was a year of Resume Optimization, 2025 will be the year of acing the interviews and MAKE THAT BREAD. I can already feel it, 2025 is going to be a great year. Happy new years!

Reading and Writing

The more I read Paul Graham's essays, the more I realize that one's ability to write corresponds with their ability to think. To be able to express and explain your feelings, mindset, or line of thought, a person needs to be able think concisely and clearly, even more-so when the only form of expression comes through words read through a paper/website.

This reminds of the scene in Billions from Taylor Mason

"I understand how hard it is to have things inside you that you can't communicate, I can't imagine how hard it must be to know HOW to say them and still NOT be allowed to" - Taylor Mason

Writing is the most refined form of thinking, conversely reading is the most refined form of learning. No wonder they say all successful people read a ton.

Blog Infrastructure: Streamlining Content Publishing with Obsidian and GitHub Actions

This idea of a blog started when I stumbled upon Network Chuck's video. It was a start to finish on how he set up a blog site using obsidian, HUGO, and HOSTINGER.

Inspired by this, I tried setting up my own.

What Sets My Setup Apart?

Unlike many "setting up Obsidian blog tutorials", including Network Chuck's, I didn’t start from scratch. My blog needed to integrate seamlessly with an already deployed website, requiring custom solutions rather than plug-and-play APIs or plugins. This additional complexity presented both challenges and opportunities.

Could this be the foundation for a SaaS product? Possibly :3

Key Features

• Integration with an Existing Website
  My blog merges directly into my portfolio website rather than operating as a standalone site.
• Customizable Themes and Aesthetics
  Fonts, headings, padding, and overall design are fully customizable to align with the site's branding.
• Rich Content Support
  The blog accommodates images, drawings, and other media types seamlessly.
• Minimum User Input I want the workflow of writing to deploying to be as frictionless as possible. Ofcourse I can

Infrastructure: Automation at Its Core

Here’s how the infrastructure is set up:

1. Obsidian is connected to a GitHub repository called portfolio-blog.
2. After finishing a blog post in Obsidian, I commit, sync, and push the changes to the repository.
3. This triggers a GitHub Action, which sends a POST request webhook to my portfolio-website repository.
4. The portfolio repository processes the webhook, verifies the changes, and deploys the updated blog to the production website.

With this setup, most of the workflow is automated, requiring minimal user intervention. GitHub Actions handle the heavy lifting, ensuring the process is smooth and efficient.

Workflow: Writing and Publishing Made Simple

Thanks to this infrastructure, writing and publishing blog posts is a seamless process. Here’s how it works:

1. Create a New File
   Start a new markdown file in Obsidian under the designated blog directory.
2. Add Metadata
   Include the title, date, and tags for the blog post.
3. Write the Content
   Draft the blog post with text, images, and drawings as needed.
4. Push the Changes
   Commit, sync, and push the updates to GitHub via Obsidian.

The automated pipeline takes over from here, deploying the blog to the live website.

Pilot

Going into 2025, one of my new year resolution is to become a better writer. Inspired by Paul Graham's essay on Write and Write Nots, I am challenging myself to become a better writer and thus a better thinker. I don't expect much traction from these blogs as these are just some notes to self, but if you are reading this, hopefully you might get some small nuggets of stories, knowledge, and inspiration.

Happy Christmas Eve!

Coding Wise

Setting up this blog was a hassle. It took me around 2 - 3 days of pure GPT + some background knowledge of Devops. I'll write a longer post explaining how and what I did to integrate note writing from obsidian to my current published website on vercel.