So, it's my first summer off. Since high school. I recently posted about taking the summer off and thought that writing weekly updates would help. My goal for this summer is to try new things and test how I structure my days and my life without a pre-existing structure there for me. Writing reflections would be a good way of noting my progress. See how I'm spending my time. That way, it's easier to see in a couple weeks if I'm on track to achieving the summer that I wanted.

Sharing my thoughts publicly

It's also a very interesting feeling, writing a blog post with the knowledge that someone may read it in the future. Do I express everything I want to say? Do I polish my words like an extension of my resume? I've always valued authenticity, and I'd want to work with people who do too, so I'll try my best to keep these updates as uniquely me as possible.

I'm writing this after the second week of my summer vacation. Though I didn't write last week, I've noticed that when you do a lot of small things, they tend to blend together. That said, I feel that I've struck a good balance between productivity and hobbies.

What's taken up my time

There was a freelance job that I took earlier this year to build a website for a small business. It's taken what seems like a fair amount of my time, though I haven't logged more than 10 hours in a week yet. I've also completed a lot of administrative work. The kind of work that gets pushed back when you're too busy with life. I made sure that my Scotiabank card was on the youth plan (since I previously got an upgraded plan as staff), started and paid for summer school (I'm taking an Intro to Music Therapy Course as an elective), and researched savings accounts deals to find the best bank for my money (this is not financial advice, but Tangerine has 4.6% interest on savings accounts with no fees. Best deal I've seen in a while).

I also created a plan for my summer. Using my favourite tool, excalidraw as an Obsidian plugin, I started by mapping out my goals. Stuff as simple as seeing friends and completing my summer course to the personal projects I've put on the backburner. I then made a month-by-month plan and broke my goals down into tasks, placing them in the summer to approximate when I wanted to start/finish things by. Here's the plan (with some information blurred for suspense ;)

June is mostly off because of a personal trip and then family wedding overseas, so I left it out of the planning. I also need to dedicate time to leetcode, as every software engineer feels the pain of... it's a shame that many modern hiring practices have not evolved past that yet.

I've continued working on my personal website which has been really fun. I'm trying to put a lot of thought and consideration into each design decision to feel full ownership. It's satisfying, thinking the design through without letting AI take the wheel. But I have tried experimenting with AI for prototyping and brainstorming, and I know I'll need to utilize it well to meet my deadlines. Overall, I want this website to be something that I have made and am happy to say, "yes, this is my website" to. So far, it's been fun.

A new Claude workflow

I've also started looking into another side project that I've wanted to try for a while. I want to test Claude's abilities and see how well it can do with a bigger project. So I started by asking it to write a spec document. I checked it over, made some changes, and was happy. But I wanted to use Claude as efficiently as possible. I told it that I want to make its development efficient, so writing a Claude.md file and perhaps a Progress.md file would make it very easy to go through the project for Claude Code because rather than looking at the spec doc and determining what is already implemented, it could just look at the progress doc. Claude told me it's a great idea, but we should also make a Decisions.md file for any design decisions made, ensuring it doesn't relitigate any decisions. Those files are now waiting to be implemented, and I'm excited to find some time to do that.

I did something similar with another project for my personal finances, and had a lot of fun there. This one was smaller so I ended up building the full thing. After playing around with it, I needed to do minimal bug fixing and Claude did great for the most part. I came up with a few new ideas to extend the project and it was really fun.

Loving coding

I believe that part of loving what I do and loving software is the fact that the possibilities are endless and much of my enjoyment is achieved from the simple things like this. I would like to think that just by prompting Claude for a spec document, I got a valuable skill. I read through everything and thought about the architecture needed for a major project, guiding most of it in my initial prompts before it wrote the document, and worked with Claude for the larger decisions. It's a different manner of development, and I consider the experience valuable in its own right.

My other activities

This reflection has gotten pretty long, so I'll end it with bullet points on small accomplishments in my first two weeks off:

• Taught my mom how to use photoshop to remove backgrounds for a work task (using Photopea, a free tool online)
• Wrote another blog post on stock symbology, which I'll post once my personal website blog functionality is up. It's been in the works since my co-op at Scotia ended, and I added some final details and refined the wording
• Cooked for my family, from massaman thai curry to a stir fry with a homemade gochujang sauce (I love exploring new recipes, especially curries)
• Went to the park, played soccer, tennis, frisbee, football, and pickleball with friends and family
• Went back to Hamilton for some meetings, discussing an AI architecture research project for next winter and helping the McMaster FUSE staff with their newly built study rooms (they need a booking portal, and as a manager on the engineering society who built our booking portal, I'll be helping bring their rooms onto our system)

Writing it all out, it sounds like a crazy first two weeks. But it's been a fun crazy, and one I'm excited to continue.