In between start and end

It was 3am when I stayed up with already-droopy-eyelids trying to figure out some system errors. 

Suddenly a Teams message popup with a "??". It came from my shy introverted senior, questioning why am I still awake. 

That pleasant 3am surprise, followed with his offer to help. 

"Come we solve the issue"

Such common gesture from a senior to a junior, was actually his first time to me. I was always the one asking for it, never once offered it.

When other seniors would suggest to hop on a call whenever we're stuck, he carried on with text messaging. When other seniors explain to you like you're 5, he never bothered to even explain. So I wondered what made him change?

We got off the call at 4am. I was touched by his effort to crack our brains together. 

He knew going on a call with me would take at least half an hour. So after taking an hour of his extra work time away, I felt utterly grateful but I still wonder, what was he thinking when he offered to help? 

Ever since then, I have been braver to bombard him with my never-ending problems. Well, he asked for it.

One day, I came to the office after a tough and stressful morning working from home. I had a deadline that day, but problems kept coming.

He physically approached me in the office. The guy who never did, did.

As he was explaining to me, to my surprise, he spoke some Malay. The guy who spoke more Chinese than English with others (most of my team are Chinese), is attempting to speak a language he almost never use before... to me?

Back during our first department trip, when we played a team game together and one person needed to be excluded, I insisted that I wanted to play. He then look at me and said, "Good... here!" as he handed the baton to me and giving up his spot. The person who never acknowledge my existence anywhere else, suddenly giving his way. 

Even after more than a year of being colleagues, it never quite felt like it. We still never talk outside of work and never joke around like how I joke around with other guy colleagues. I still find it funny how he was the reason I got permanently hired after my internship (since he gave his approval to recommend me) and he is currently the only senior left from my internship days, yet I'm still this awkward with him.

I kept telling myself, he's probably just a shy guy.

Dropping by,

Some time last month, I became a TikTok creator. Of kpop contents haha. 

I was on my Twitter stan account when I came across several tweets by the fanbase. Apparently, they wanted more fans to promote the idol group's contents on TikTok. 

Didn't bat an eye at first. A couple of convincing tweets later, I ended up posting video edits on TikTok.  

Although it was a short phase that lasted about 2 weeks, I learnt some cool things about the app from a fellow creator's perspective!

Fun fact. TikTok isn't the first app I use to post fan edits 🤭

I posted similar contents on Instagram back then - prior to it turning into Reels. So there were couple of things I notice rather quickly about TikTok.

The first thing that stood out to me was that literally everyone and anyone goes viral daily!

Personally, it took me just a couple days to go from 20 views per video to 10,000 views per video. 

On the contrary, 100 views is already considered a lot by Instagram standard when you first started out. Mind you that I didn't have any followers until that 10,000 views video started blowing up. 

My next video that went viral even reached 100,000 views overnight! Not to mention that it was the video right after the 10,000 views one. 

It was insane to think about.

This left me dying of curiosity so I spent the next few days, trying to play around with the algorithm to figure out how the app works. Of course, I didn't manage to break all the codes, but there were some hints I discovered that could explain how my posts did so well.

No wonder people go crazy on upload time. It is a game changer! Both of my viral videos were posted at 5pm on a weekday and I don't think it was a coincidence.

So if you're based in Malaysia, be wary on listening to non-Malaysian hacks! It probably won't work with our culture and social media habits as it works on the recommender's followers.

TikTok isn't an app where you should care about your feed looking pretty. The main goal is to be on the For You Page (FYP) and get people to engage as much as they should!

The TikTok algorithm will blast your videos to random niches and let various users decide the virality based on the engagements your videos are getting. It's why new accounts are the easiest to go viral. So avoid experimenting too much with your videos when posting on TikTok.

However, take note that once you've built some followings, that's when you should pay attention to your follower's active time instead. If you want your video to enter FYP, it has to do well among your followers first before TikTok shares it with non-followers.

Unlike Instagram, I realize 'likes' didn't help much in terms of virality. Instead, shares and comments were the ones boosting the numbers. 

So it's important to include some sort of call-to-action (CTA) in your videos such as asking people to share, comment, etc. Or try to make some share-worthy contents!

TikTok values average time for each post. 

The longer people watch your video, the higher the average time gets. Considering how fast people swipe on TikTok, it isn't easy to get people to stay but providing titles or a captivating 3 seconds-intro really helps!

Funny thing about netizens are that they could comment about something you totally didn't see when you first posted. I get mindblown whenever this happens and it wasn't just once or twice! 🤯

Even though you have little to no control over this kind of reaction, do know that this is also a quick and easy recipe to virality. 

Plus, the comments get super interesting to read too!

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

Although, my creative juices stopped after about 10 videos, creating on TikTok had been fun while it lasts.

I will probably return to it when I have more time to spare in the future. No promises though.

Shameless plug coming thru 😜 

@choiunics

Dropping by,

Been awhile since I share about the current happenings at work. I guess, with me still WFH, it's still always the same boring stuff. Though on a side note, I actually transferred department! Well, my whole team did. But this post isn't about that. Probably will explain in a different post.

The more I work on different projects, the more I realized how much learning I need to go through for each one of them. Everything is so unrelated to one another 😵

At first I figured it would just be the different programming languages and all those thing a software engineer expected to do. But then after awhile, it's not just the IT skills anymore.

Every project would have different clients and each require me to understand different requirements. From understanding tax terms when I was an intern, to currently learning about insurance contract terms like IFRS17. It honestly felt like out of my job scope already. Not to mention, my IT skills are also needed on top of it. 

I now understand how experience could increase your value as an employee. Employers aren't just looking for people with the skills based on your field of study, you are valued more if you have a combination of both your skills AND client's needs - in my case, an IFRS17 background.

Honestly, things are bearable if they come one at a time and one thing pauses when another appears. That is actually what happened to me. For the past 4 months, I am constantly assigned to 2-3 different projects but then each one of them also have really slow progresses, which I'm super grateful for btw. Can't imagine learning and doing so many things at once. Definitely not at that level yet eek.

In this situation, I am reminded of one of the university courses I took on my final semester, where I had to refer to manuals and lecture videos to understand how the software tool works. It felt like being a student again. I'm not sure if this is totally normal - learning during work hours - but it's indeed what I've been working on at the moment. It's not as busy as when there is definite deadline with these clients, but it is definitely time and mentally consuming to be expected to know from A to Z.

And with everything new... I can't wait to finally be familiar with this thing!! The beginning of a learning phase is always my least favourite. You feel so vulnerable and clueless that you don't even know what you don't know. 

Although I've grown pretty much accustomed to doing it alone, from all those studying and working from home for the past 2 years, it's still a lot of self-discipline needed for myself. Always a challenge to manage my time, followed by the struggle to muster up courage and ask for help.

Sometimes I question, do I deserve this much pay when I am pretty much still being treated AND acting like an intern lol. 

Don't get me wrong, it still is very much exciting to learn and assigned to a variety of projects when I'm just starting out. My mum asked me the other day, "Your clients memang from various industry eh?" when I told her about my current engagement and that made me realize how variety KPMG clients are. 

Also she told me that accounting/financial professionals are pretty much "lifeless" when I told her that the team I'm collaborating with are from the accounting department and they work 24/7, like they even attend meetings on their annual leaves 😳

Coming from someone who needs that work-life balance, damn I could never relate...

Lastly, as my first post of 2022, I'd like to wish my dearest readers a HAPPY NEW YEAR!! Hope it's not to late to wish you a happy and fulfilling year ahead. May Allah bless you in this new year always ❤️️

Dropping by,

So I wasn't able to achieve all of my 2021 resolutions... and I kinda expected that. My intention was not to check as many boxes as I can from that list. It was to just get myself moving closer towards my bigger goals and with that, I can proudly say that I've succeeded!

My 2021 resolutions were

1. Graduate with at least 3.5 CGPA

2. Build micro habit system

3. Upload more kpop covers that I did in 2019

4. Rebuild that emergency fund

5. Upload a blog post at least once a month

The only goals I didn't achieve were those which were no longer my top priorities as much as I thought it was.

Sure, I love to have myself upload a post here every month. Trust me, I did draft something each month. But I guess, there's just other things I wished to spend more time on than writing a post for the sake of it.

A lot of things happened and I kinda lost touch from them since I didn't record the events at all. Well, to me, that is somewhat a good sign because I used to write when things get tough to vent out my frustrations. So when I write less, it also means that I am less stressed.

All in all, I'm truly happy this year. My life received so many intangible blessings and intrinsic satisfaction. I learnt a lot about myself. I achieved so much within my own capacity that matters a lot to me alone. It just felt good to be happy about yourself on your own. I kinda stop worrying wanting to show people what I can do and what they might think of it. Sometimes, I get proud of myself for doing things for myself. I just love that I am always my own priority, as selfish as that sounds oops.

But it's true. My ultimate goals won't matter if I'm NOT doing those for myself.

So to end the year, here are my 2022 resolutions that I'm not putting much thought on in listing down because I already have the bigger picture in mind.

1. Finish 3 self-help books.

2. Invest RM5000 in total.

3. Limit my spending to lesser than RM600 per month.

4. Reach 3500 skips a day.

5. Be more generous with friends and family.

6. Complete a Javascript course.

7. Complete a Laravel framework project tutorial.

8. Fast every Monday and Thursday for 6 months (excluding Ramadhan month).

I do have more smaller goals but I'm putting the hard or almost impossible ones here so that I am more keen in pushing myself further.

It might seem a lot to focus on in that list, but I've actually been partly doing all of those in my life already. I'm just enhancing what I've already been doing so that I could stick with it longer to reap more benefits in the future.

I'm so excited for the upcoming year. I'm saving so much for a travel trip and hoping I could save the amount I expected by the end of 2022. Pray for me!

On an ending note, I pray that everyone reading this have an amazing and blessed year ahead! InsyaAllah~

Dropping by,

After finishing internship and going through all that, I was lucky to be offered a job by my internship company - KPMG. 

Funny thing was, a day after KPMG called me, another company decided to proceed me with the next interview stage. Talk about timing. Didn't even put much hope on the first round!

However, I declined the follow-up interview invitation on the spot and had a hard time moving on with it, because as much as I'd like to work in KPMG, this company actually aligned more with my career interest... Long story short, I think that regret lessen after finding out how much KPMG is paying me my starting salary haha. Also, the fact that I am still part of the development team is actually good enough. 

I respect people who moved on with all their interviews and end up with multiple job offers, because interviews (especially multiple stages) is actually very mentally taxing and if I managed to secure one good offer, you best bet I don't want to go through the rest of the trouble only to decline it later.

Now, the department told me to start next week which means that I only have like 3 weeks break from my 6-months internship. Honestly, it's quite sad but I guess, I should feel relieved that I don't have to worry about job applications any further.

I stopped applying mid-August and all those companies got back to me within a month - some earlier than the rest. I had interviews while I was busy finishing up my internship report and presentation, but thank God for work from home. I literally scheduled the interviews in-between my meetings.

There's a lot of lesson learnt from the entire process, which somehow helped me to understand my rights as an employee better. I'm glad I got a taste of how hard real job interviews can be. I highly recommend fresh grad to savour the different experiences BUT didn't say it was gonna be all rainbows and sunshine.

If there's one thing I got out of all this, it would be to give your best in every single job application. Treat each one of them like it's the only job you want while applying, without seeing desperate. The results might be in your favour if you show them how great of a match you are.

For now, goodbye job interviews, goodbye my last ever student break... Hello, adulthood and commitments.

Dropping by,

Thinking of recommending some songs I got hooked to on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. And well since blog is my only safe haven, why not share it at the place where nobody usually comes right? 

Disclaimer: Like any other commitment-related stuff, I can't promise that I will have a part 2 onwards BUT I'll try my best to not ditch it so soon hehe.

Song Pick is basically a series with a list of song recommendations that I've recently discovered and enjoyed for the past month or so. I think my music taste is very typical pop genre and a little ballad depending on my mood. I do listen to hiphop and raps, but often times when I do listen to those it's either because someone recommended it to me or my favorite artists have something to do with it. All in all, I hope you can give some of them a listen!

When I first heard this, I thought it was just a nice happy summer song. But when I wanted to sing along with it, I realized that behind the summery vibe the lyrics were actually very motivational.

I'm currently in the phase of feeling insecure as a fresh grad, so this song literally came just in time to tell me that "it's okay if you don't have anything you want to do and it's okay to walk a little slower".

This song has an English ver. as well, but to me, Korean lyrics are best when you understand the actual phrases they use. Not gonna lie, I kinda felt reassured about my life after listening to this.

I'm so biased with this recommendation lol. This song is by the three PENTAGON maknae a.k.a the trio who produced a lot of other PENTAGON's songs. Kinda like the 3RACHA of PENTAGON if I can steal that idea haha.

Cerberus is the 3-headed dog who guides the gate of hell according to the Greek methodology. Basically, they're comparing themselves to it since they're the viscous trio.

I like when a song has a good hook and this one definitely has that! At Kino's part (0:42)! 

Ok, confession time. I actually have not watched the last episode of Kingdom oops. But I'm already spoiled and know the entire ranking so it's fine. Don't feel like wasting 3 hours of watching iKON losing lol.

But since the final song was pre-released, I listened to this song before seeing their performance stage and boy, did I really like it. No wonder this song topped the charts so quickly!

My fav has to be Sangyeon's high note at the end. The live performance literally gave me goosebumps!!

Not a new song but I only properly listened to it after discovering it from SuperStar YG. It's one of those sad BP song. Not that they have a lot of it anyway but I really liked 'Stay' so this song has a similar vibe.

The chorus says it all.

My brother have been weirdly obsessed with Stray Kids after founding out they sang for one of the anime's ED (ending theme song). He was surprised upon finding out they sang 'God's Menu' and that I made a dance cover of the song last year(?). Then Kingdom happened so we talked about SKZ a lot since I also heard more of them from Kingdom.

Now, he's at that fanboying stage and his bias is Seungmin haha. Since they just came back with 'Thunderous', naturally, my bro made me listen to their latest album and this song was one of our common like. He isn't really into heavy EDM songs so I guess this song successfully made the cut. 

P.S. He also wasn't into 'God's Menu' actually boohoo. 

Not a fan of Wanna One but because I watched the web drama "Love Revolution", I decided to give his comeback a listen which I turn out to quite enjoy.

This is an old song by g.o.d so it sounds very 1st gen kpop. But my boys sounds good singing some oldies and if you like some Hospital Playlist OST vibe, check this one out for that same OST-worthy feeling. Best yet, it's on Spotify too!

Here's a video of the performance for a good view of their vocal harmonization.

P.S. If you didn't know, Hospital Playlist's OST are remakes of songs from the 90s too!

I guess Imma end the list here. Just keeping the list short one at a time, even though I have more on repeat haha.

Dropping by,

We have finally come this far. I'm almost finishing 6 months of real working experience without even stepping into the office at all or get to meet my colleagues in real life, but that's okay cos I really like working from bed home. 

I don't like to admit that I've changed BUT I definitely felt like my thought process changed so much compared to the first half of 2021. 

My performance during my internship wasn't exactly applaudable though. I never quiet stand out among the other interns and my image to my seniors were probably that I'm the kind to "only do as I told" or a "yes man". Honestly, I did only deliver what was requested and even so, it felt like I've done enough. I guess I'm not that ambitious after all haha.

However, I love that my job allows me to have a fair share of work-life balance. It's an unspoken rule that nobody messages outside of office hours and I really like that boundary.

During my free time, I've been really into self-development stuff, specifically investment and coding side projects. 

For the first one, I started from learning about personal finance to the benefits and strategies of investing especially for beginners and youngsters. For someone who likes to have plans, understanding more about healthy financial strategies and what should be the smarter money decision kinda get me into that mindset where I should act as if I am already making a big amount of money even when I haven't.

I also joined a couple of webinars regarding investments and even found good YouTube contents explaining more on the financial stuff, which opened my eyes a lot. I also started reading some financial books, though this one is taking me forever to finish but I am indeed making some progress which I'm still catching up on.

And on top of that, I've been trying to be better at programming whereby I started to play with codes based on my own initiative. Quiet scary at first but finally convinced myself to start somewhere.

At first, I started because of the pressure at work but then I found a really good tutorial by chance, which made me realize that personal projects don't have to be 100% original. Like I can literally follow a tutorial on YouTube, style it in my own way and call that mine. So, I've been trying to do that, even though it's quiet hard to keep up especially when I'm always stuck with errors related to different operating system (aka out of my control). The amount of troubleshooting is kinda tiring to say the least. But I have hope in completing the entire course so I hope I can share the link to this project in the future 🙏

Lastly, of course since I am left with a couple more weeks, I have started to apply for permanent roles and some graduate programmes. After talking to my team leader on some potential career paths and the different technologies, I don't think I'll be staying in KPMG after the internship just because I realized that they don't have the software structure that I wanted to learn more of. 

I'm still at that exploration stage and I'm glad that I kinda have something else that I can look forward to from another company. So, currently still hoping for a reply from some of my applications haha.

Despite the situation being very disheartening lately in Malaysia, I am very grateful that I am able to feel at ease from a personal level. I can only hope and pray better days will come, also days where I can meet my friends, have sleepovers and go karaoke cos damn, I miss singing my hearts out 😞

Side note: Please pray that I can get my internship report done so I can have more time for myself lol.

Dropping by,

I saw someone posted on Twitter, where she was encouraging SPM students to further their studies in computer science because being in the tech industry could guarantee you really good salary in the future. 

Despite some kind of truth mentioned, seeing how the quote retweets mostly talked about the stress and that it isn't worth the money at all made me ponder upon it. A lot of them also said how hard coding is for them.

Throughout my secondary education, I remembered the subject that gave the greatest satisfaction to me was accounts. Funny thing was, I only felt it towards the final revision classes leading up to SPM. It was the time I successfully balanced out my Kunci Kira Kira for the first time by my own effort. 

Being in the extra class with top students, I was always behind. Those who take up accounts as an extra subject were mostly those who guaranteed an A from it. Me on the other hand, was the total opposite, yet I remembered being super happy after I got my SPM results and glad that I stick through with it (despite my teachers countlessly asked me to consider dropping the subject due to my poor trial results).

Accounts was the subject which I considered paling berjasa to discovering my career interest.

When I was finding my path after SPM, like everyone else, I had a lot of doubts. After crossing out what I disliked, I ended up with either IT or engineering diploma. And because I kinda hated formulas and physics, I listed IT as the higher option.

After enrolling in Computer Science, I expected myself to be able to write codes and create some cool apps once I graduate. 

IT or Computer Science is a challenging course but what course isn't tbh. Still to me, it is one of the simplest compared to other science and math courses.

Most importantly, Computer Science is the only STEM course that lets you be creative without needing any artistic skill. That's when I realize you don't need to be good at drawing and painting to be creative because with coding, website interface is literally your canvas.

So to answer that tweet and the quote retweets, yes I think computer science brings a lot of opportunities these days due to the high demand and you should consider it if it interests you. 

But from the perspective of someone who doesn't have negative ideas off of coding, just like accounts, coding is really rewarding for me. I don't mean in terms of money, instead in terms of work satisfaction. 

In every small task you're tryna complete, it requires some sort of problem solving. With coding, finding the solution is often visually present in the form of success or error. 

Like Kunci Kira Kira, balancing the sheets was rewarding because it shows that my calculation was right. In coding it feels rewarding every time I got to clear out an error.

When you're just starting out, it sucks to repeatedly face the same error and I think that's why a lot of people find it difficult. Problem solving in coding is not just about finding the missing puzzle, it's about identifying why it raised the error and the most efficient solution that won't disrupt the other code pieces. In order to do that, you have to think of 1001 ways and attempt them before finding the one that is most suitable to your current project.

Going through that 1001 ways is the tiring part and the part which feels like you will never get the right answer. Also, the part where you might get sleepless nights from. I learn after coding consistently on the job as a software developer intern that you gotta embrace every error you get. Each error introduce you to another way in improving your code solution. There is no better teacher than your errors. Honestly, it's why practice is crucial in this field and I finally see that now.

Also, I think the pressure given within the organization and the team matters a lot. The difference between healthy pressure and toxic pressure can really determine your job satisfaction.

Here's My Plan or "목표가 생겼다" (literally "I Found A Goal"), is a 4-episode MBC mini-series starring some of our small rising stars, Kim Hwan Hee and Kim Do Hoon. 

It was released pretty recently on May 19, 2021 and I'm surprised how little attention this drama got. Even I happen to found it by chance through another web drama.

I felt a bit burdened when people ask for my opinion. I appreciate if people think my input could be some sort of help but it always gets to me that the advice probably was a good advice for myself but not to the person I'm advising.

Being an opiniated person, putting myself in a selfless position when giving other people advice is hard. When I told others to have self-control when I am struggling with it myself. Or when I advised to avoid impulse purchase but later proceed to do so myself. Or when I said it's doable but proceed to fail doing it myself. 

I felt worse for giving those advice than to fail doing the thing itself. It's as if I declared to people that I'm prone to be successful doing it, when in reality, there's so many variables to consider as well.

Sometimes I hardly remember the failures I had bcos it was never considered as failures. I only see the progresses and aim higher thinking there's never anything to lose. Then when someone came to me and ask me how did I do it, I... don't quite know. I can't recall how much I struggled achieving it and thus, I don't have an answer to that.

That is why I probably suck at teaching and explaining. Even in my current intern job, whenever I solve the issue and move on to a new one, I always almost never remember how I managed to solve it. All I remember is how complicated it was and how long it took me to figure out one small fix. So when my team leader asked me, what exactly did the code do, I will always freeze in silence. It's not that I didn't know because duh, I fixed it. But it's just that it was hard for me to explain because the whole process is so complicated in my head.

I tried to be quick on my feet for a simplified explanation but often times ended up with my team leader just reading line by line of code himself.

I guess that's how it is in life too. When there's so many variables to consider and an advice isn't just a lengthy yes or no, but instead an entire lifestyle to put into picture, things will probably be easier to show than explained.

Like self-control isn't only about avoiding instant gratification and opting for delayed gratification, but it should be about finding out why does it have to be later and not now.

When I wanted to buy a PENTAGON lightstick while I was in Korea and even had that in the top of my wishlist. I found out that it was out of stock in all the kpop stores there so the planned purchase didn't happen. When I went to their concert in 2019 without a lightstick, I thought I might as well buy it some other time as there wasn't a reason to buy it in the nearest future.

You can tell I've been eyeing it for a long time since. Even the Shopee store that I wanted to buy from later not only marked up the price after a couple of months, but they also turned into an official store recently. Which means that from not being able to use the Shopee coins, to now being able to save more using them. Despite not having a budget for it, I immediately bought it during Shopee's 6.6 opening sale because of how good the deal was. I thought it was an impulse purchase at first, but then I realized how much I've been waiting for a good reason to buy and I guess, the right time just happen.

To me, that was how my self-control looks like. It's not something you would want to hear when asking for an opinion whether or not you should buy something, right?

But even so, there's no obligation for you to take the advice. We're too different to have a one answer fits all. I guess what I'm trying to say is, no external validation should be more defining than your own opinion. At the end of the day, the best choice is the choice you made for yourself.

Dropping by,