I graduated last June from the University of Chicago then moved to London in September for my girlfriend, and I’m currently working at a cafe in Aldgate. I’ve really enjoyed working at the cafe! It’s a rewarding position in that I get to have conversations with interesting people of all walks of life, and give them a product which I think will brighten their day. In line with this, I’ve gotten pretty good at making latte art! I’m also extremely lucky that not one of my co-workers has ever bored me, or been unwilling to crack a joke and raise a smile. But this is temporary - I got the job not a month after I arrived, and I’m ready to move onto the next step.

Everyone says the markets worse than it’s ever been, especially in tech, and especially in London, but I also didn’t know that I was going to move here until pretty late on. I don’t bear any anger for the me who didn’t have a job by the time I left for London, but I’ve come to realize that I need to get on with my professional life. Yes, I can practice many useful and fulfilling skills at the cafe, some which wouldn’t be possible in an office setting, but I’ve come to feel I’m in statis. I feel that I don’t have any momentum, the traces of which left me just after I arrived here.

You could view this website I made as something to kickstart my momentum, and the blog as a means to share and document how I’ll gain it. The job application system is crushing, and in this ancient city built on secrets and preserved by tradition, I sometimes feel that I can hardly breathe. I want this website to become a digital portfolio and personal archive: an effort to create space for myself in a place where space is put on a premium.

So as of right now, I’ve put on the projects which I am really proud of. The most recent is the Rust reading-buddy, which I worked on a lot in October, but I hope to put more up soon. My approach in the last couple months has been to read a lot of textbooks, work on my interviewing skills, solve LeetCode problems, and try to hone my understanding of the broader world of tech past an undergrad level. I think this was the wrong approach - I need to build, and keep building as much as I can. So even after I just finished Gjengset’s Rust for Rustaceans and Blandy’s Programming Rust, the enthusiasm for the language they shared with me needs to be put on hold, because I want to build as fast as I can with a language that supports it, Python. I’ve always used Python for various things, like testing automation, arch scripts, data processing, and so on so forth, but I want to use it now to create projects start to finish in a timely fashion. I think Rust is just isn’t built for this, even though I love everything about it.

Briefly, I’ll describe a couple projects I’ve been workshopping that I want to build as soon as possible. I want to build a small compiler for a toy-ish language that I can implement in an advanced calculator app. I want to create a containerization software for customizable runtimes, at least on Linux. I want to build another useful architecture like Github with something different, think feature branch, as a learning experience. And finally I have an idea which I’ve been working on for an app to put on the app store, which will hopefully be released before summer. Of course, I’ll be applying to job openings as well. All in all, I have my work cut out for me, but the process will all be documented here, on this blog.

This is really written for the thousands of people who are likely in a similar position as I am, but I hope that for anyone who reads it, they may understand my position and gain something from it. Don’t get the wrong idea however - I’m not rueful of my status nor hopeless for my future. In fact, I’m very excited for what’s to come. Yes, I’ve never struggled much with being optimistic, just perhaps sometimes foolishly so.