I've been finding my footing this week, and reflecting a lot more on what this time off really means to me. I have my trip in June and then I start part-time software consulting in July, so May is really the only month off. Halfway done, and sometimes I feel like I'm still running, while other times I'm bored and without motivation. Luckily there's not too much boredom. There's so much I want to do, so it's more that I don't want to keep staring at a computer screen all day but the weather isn't good enough to go on a long walk. Not that weather should stop me if I'm really committed.

Looking forward

I have a lot of side projects that I want to finish, plus preparations for full-time role applications starting in July. For what needs to be done this month, there's Leetcode, my personal website, my resume, and reconnecting with old coworkers. If I can, I want to continue exploring my side projects as well. I had a lot of fun building a Streamlit app to view my finances. It uses a sqlite database and I originally made a script to log them as a way of experimenting with sqlite. Now that I've built an app wrapper around it, it's super useful. I can view my spending, broken down daily, monthly, or by category, and further filter each one by category, date, and more. It lets me see that I spend an average of $x per month of groceries and $y on transportation. Now that I'm writing this, a budget functionality might be interesting, but for now I just like being able to track my spending and analyze if I'm going overboard anywhere.

Reconnecting with people

I've reached out to a few old contacts and realized how hard it can be to get people's time. Even for those who loved me in person and eagerly gave their personal emails to stay in touch, I haven't gotten a reply. I'd like to think that I didn't go to their spam, but there's not much I can do when they don't check LinkedIn either. Luckily, some contacts have been responsive and it's been great catching up with them. Work matters aside, I find it helpful to hear about what others in the industry think and experience so I can contextualize my own thoughts. Especially when it comes to using AI in the workplace. Without a massive budget, I don't know what the cutting edge of AI looks like, nor can I experience the problems it is able to solve and those it still has trouble with.

Spare time

I've enjoyed going to the gym more and being active this week. Went two days in a row, then did an ab workout, run, and pickleball the next day. Exercise helps a lot in reducing fatigue (sounds counterintuitive, no?) and keeping me motivated to keep chugging along at my personal projects, so I'm grateful the weather is warming up because it makes it much easier to explore different sports. I'm interested in getting into biking this summer because it's a nice active sport that I can do during the workday when everyone else is busy.

I posted on LinkedIn about lessons I learned from co-op and made a serious mistake. I thought I had scheduled it for 11am, but I accidentally did 1am! I don't know how the algorithm actually works, but AI seems to think that posting at 1am is a graveyard because posts do well if they get engagement during the first couple hours. It's an interesting feeling because I don't need the post to do well, I didn't post it to show off. I posted it because I genuinely wanted to give advice to others and thought a post could be helpful. So not many people seeing it means the lessons won't be shared at widely as I might have hoped. Maybe some of them are repeated, but I think there's some novel ideas there that I at least haven't seen on LinkedIn.

My photo editing success story

Finally, I've played with photo editing and had a lot of fun. First for my freelance work, but also just yesterday for InfraTech. We've always wanted a floor plan of the building that our study rooms are in (I manage a team that maintains the engineering society website, including projects like a booking system for rooms owned by the society). We got an official floor plan, but it isn't great because it's too detailed. I took matters into my own hands and threw the floor plan into Gemini along with requests for how I wanted it simplified (surprisingly, of Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, Gemini was the only one who maintained the actual structure of the plan and followed instructions well for the output). It didn't get everything perfect, so I opened up Krita (a free photo editing software) and cleaned it up. Removed couches that it drew where there were none among other things.

For reference, here's the original floor plan: Open HatchFloorPlan_Original.pdf

The Gemini created plan:

My final version:

What took me the longest was figuring out how to convert the couches that it added into lockers. Luckily, I think it looks pretty good! And doesn't falsely sell the bathroom as having two toilets and two sinks.

Overall, it was a good week. Productive in my own work, freelance work, InfraTech work, and personal well-being. Next week, I hope to continue balancing productivity with family time and exercise. My main goal: finish the projects page of my website.