We celebrated my dad's birthday and I organized a full kbbq/hot pot dinner at home, plus cooked an indian meal for the next week! So it was the most cooking I've done in a while, plus this was a very professional development heavy week. I decided that now was the time (largely due to job application reasons) to get the first version of my website up, and I did something I never would have imagined. I recorded myself.

Cooking extravaganza

Let's start with the cooking. We've got a little grill/hotpot setup at home, and my birthday gift for my father was organizing a feast. Sliced beef, gochujang marinaded chicken, lamb/beef rolls, and more. I've never carried so many groceries in my life, nor have I cooked so much before. Because I was also introducing my family to my special recipe, a homemade meal I randomly came up with when experimenting with coconut milk in my indian cooking. Very heavy on the cumin & coriander plus tumeric for a nice warmth, plus a richness from the coconut milk. So, that was near a full day of prep, cooking, and cleanup. Plus enjoying the food of course :)

Career counselling

On Monday, I had a career counselling session through my school on LinkedIn. I wanted to make sure it was ready for job applications, and I've already put in effort this past year, so some professional fine-tuning was my next step. I got great advice on branding myself, a realization that adding Co-op Student of the Year to my tagline is far better than just leaving it in the awards section, and that there was no reason to leave out skills from my work experience for the sake of space if I had decent bullet points for each one.

Showcasing... me?

After that, it was website time. I started with a nice contact form to get in touch with me, letting Claude write that up while I began drafting the plan for my ultimate differentiator. LinkedIn already has details on my work experience, so what could my website do differently? I took inspiration from Scotiabank's new grad recruiters who mentioned that they want to know more about us, since all applicants have their Scotia experience in common. I wanted my website to showcase me. And I decided that the best (or at least I'm hoping, most personable) way to do that would be videos.

This was a scary thought. I've always been someone who enjoys leading and helping others but doesn't like the spotlight. So I keep that leadership to private channels, such as straight to my team of developers on the engineering society, rather than putting everything online for the world to see. Yet now, I wanted to talk about my experiences, on video, publicly accessible for the sake of letting others connect to who I am as a person.

Building up

Honestly, I think these blogs helped. I decided to think of it like this: barely anyone will see my website. For those who do, letting them learn about me and understand me better can only help. It's true for the blogs and letting people read about how I think, so why not let them hear me speak? Let them see how I communicate, voice my ideas, and hope that my passion shines through.

I'm still a bit self-conscious about it, but I'm choosing to think of it as my own character growth.

Showcasing myself

Making these videos was also a fun exercise in self-reflection. What do I want to share about myself? What will catch someone's attention without coming off as stuck up? Knowing that I was being recorded really made me conscious about what I was saying and how I said it. The goal was always to let my passion through, sharing bits about myself, but I do think I've done some really cool things and want to share that as well.

After recording, I learned some fun new skills to get them ready for the website. I decided to host the videos on Cloudflare's R2 platform and needed to add captions, compress them, and cut the beginning and ends. I had this whole flow which I'll use AI to draw nicely in a code block below:

┌─────────────────┐
│   Raw Video     │
└────────┬────────┘
         │
         ▼
┌─────────────────────────────┐
│           CapCut            │
│  - Trim start/end           │
│  - Voice isolation          │
└────────┬────────────────────┘
         │  export
         ▼
┌─────────────────────────────┐
│        Subtitle Edit        │
│  - Generate captions        │
│    (Whisper)                │
└────────┬────────────────────┘
         │
         ▼
┌─────────────────────────────┐
│      Proofread Captions     │
└────────┬────────────────────┘
         │
         ▼
┌─────────────────────────────┐
│           ffmpeg             │
│  - Compress video            │
│  - Burn in captions          │
│    (single pass)             │
└────────┬────────────────────┘
         │
         ▼
┌─────────────────────────────┐
│        Final Video          │
│  Crisp captions, no double  │
│  compression                │
└─────────────────────────────┘

Overall, very productive week! The videos were fun to record, I even got on the guitar because I've been playing for more than a decade. If I'm going to say that I play guitar, I'm going to make sure that I show and don't just tell. Since you're already on my website if you're reading this, check out my about me page to see the final product :)