This article is a review and reflection on the week from 2023-12-31 to 2024-01-06.
Cheers to a New Beginning#
On New Year's Eve, I spent time with Xiong Xiaohua at a friend's house. Although we forgot to bring the Switch controller, it was fortunate that Everybody 1-2-Switch! supports online gaming with smartphones. While playing the game, we could already see some scattered fireworks outside the window. When there were 30 seconds left to enter the new year, we hurriedly went to the balcony and immersed ourselves in the fireworks of the whole city. In the chilly wind, we wished each other a happy new year, watched the distant horizon light up with fireworks, and then stepped into 2024.
Life#
Daily Challenges of Annual Plans#
On December 30th last year, Xiong Xiaohua and I made a plan for 2024. Starting from the new year, we checked off the plan together. Although we overestimated our own motivation, having a goal is always good. Previously, I saw Marc Backes' Goals for 2023 🎯 webpage, which quantifies and visualizes (and in style) the updates and encourages the completion of annual plans. This gave me inspiration, and the first thing that came to mind was to list my reading list and push myself to read more books.
Steamed Buns#
Since buying an electronic scale on Action at the end of last year, I have finally overcome the dilemma of "a little" and "appropriate" and made breakthroughs in dough fermentation, maintaining a stable level. This week, at the request of Xiong Xiaohua, who was hit by the algorithm on Xiaohongshu, we tried to make colorful steamed buns with pumpkin and spinach. Except that the spinach didn't rise well for some unknown reason and ended up being a bit hard to eat, it was generally successful. In the end, we both experienced the joy of making handicrafts like we did when we were children.
Manuscript Reviews#
On the first working day of the new year, I received a new invitation from Manning Publications to review the manuscript of "Django in Action". I had already participated in two rounds of reviews before, but because the manuscript of this book was released gradually, I will be reviewing new chapters this time. I didn't expect to go from being a reader and consumer to an amateur reviewer, but I will need to be more careful when reading because I know the frustration of making mistakes as an author. In the next three weeks, I will review the new draft of this book and review Django again.
This week, I received the official confirmation email for being selected to participate in The National SDG Challenge. I applied last summer but was not selected, but this time I was selected for the Winter edition. I was assigned to the IBM Team, and the problem given by IBM is practical and in a direction that I like, and I can also use my previous experience. In the WhatsApp group created by the organizer, I found that our team is quite diverse through everyone's self-introduction. Everyone has different professional, cultural backgrounds, and hobbies, but we have the same goal. This should be an interesting experience.
Korean Dramas#
This week, Xiong Xiaohua and I finished watching the popular drama "Squid Game". The whole drama is an excellent commercial series, with good control of the rhythm under the dual narrative, and the ending is relatively complete without leaving any loose ends. The only flaw is that the ending is a bit too deliberate in order to set the stage for the second season.
The bloody scenes in the drama are explicit to an unnecessary extent, even reminiscent of the style of "Saw". After discussing with Xiong Xiaohua, I realized that I, like those VIPs, was watching this "horse race" behind the camera and gaining experience from this bloodshed and cruelty. This reflection of reality and the mirror of the drama, I don't know if it was intentional by the director or our over-interpretation.
Upon Xiong Xiaohua's recommendation, we started watching "Reply 1988". Although we have only watched one episode, I already like this drama. Although it was aired in 2015, it delicately captures the historical atmosphere of 1988: in June 1997, during the democratic movement, South Korea broke free from military dictatorship and moved towards democracy. The sixth republic of South Korea, which was less than a year old, was going to host the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The complex emotions that came with it include the excitement of South Korea's return to the world, the optimism of the Asian economic miracle, and the reality of people returning to individual life. A slogan hanging in the Olympic venue in the drama reflects this expectation well:
The world moves towards Seoul, Seoul moves towards the world.
Data Science#
This week, I continued my plan of watching one section of Datacamp every day and completed the course "Introduction to Statistics in Python". The content of this course is not so difficult, but it rekindled my curiosity about statistics, which had been worn down by the pre-statistics course over the past few months. In this course, I learned about statistics distributions, and I plan to write a separate summary. Also, following the principle of learn in public, I:
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Uploaded my study notes from Jupyter Notebook to GitHub.
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Rejoined the #100DaysOfCode challenge on freeCodeCamp's Discord.
Internship#
As the semester ended and Christmas vacation approached, I did not continue to apply for internships. ASML, with whom I had active communication before, sent me a rejection letter this week, but I am already familiar with the internship application process, so I will continue to apply. Since I am already in the Netherlands, I would still like to experience working at ASML if given the opportunity. After all, the lithography machine is the gem of the modern industrial system.
Before the holiday, I also applied for an internship at another company, but the waiting time is longer due to the Christmas and New Year holidays. I thought I had no chance, but then I sent an email to inquire about the progress and got the opportunity to participate in the next round of Technical Assessment. I thought it would only be a test of basic programming skills, but it turned out to require a lot of mathematical knowledge and data manipulation operations. Fortunately, since the holiday, I have been studying the Data Scientist Professional with Python course on Datacamp, so I have a good understanding of the knowledge needed for the solutions, including the statistical knowledge that I just learned that morning. I am quite satisfied with the overall solutions and hope to make progress next week.
Reading#
"Sweet Death Dedicated to the Great Detective"#
This week, I continued reading "Sweet Death Dedicated to the Great Detective" by Fanzhang Guihui. The first half of the book has a slightly pretentious dialogue style and unnatural plot progression, which made it difficult for me to continue reading at one point. However, when the author used the setting of the mystery taking place in a virtual reality world and introduced the segment where the deceased speaks, I became interested again and followed the plot. I discovered some clever ideas from the author. In Fanzhang Guihui's previous book, "Visitor to a Lonely Island," she showed her unique understanding of detective novels: making good use of world-building to create novel puzzles while adhering to the principles of traditional detective stories, giving readers a fair chance to solve the mystery. Therefore, I feel that "Sweet Death Dedicated to the Great Detective" is worth continuing to read.
"Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology"#
This week, following my annual reading plan, I started reading "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology" by Chris Miller. Although I haven't reached the main content yet, I have learned about Fairchild Semiconductor, which incubated Silicon Valley, the main architectures of chips (x86, ARM, and RISC-V), and ARM's business story from the expanded reading of the Cast of Characters and Glossary. Because there is too much knowledge to catch up on at the beginning, the progress of reading has not met my expectations, but discovering the story itself is also one of the pleasures of reading non-fiction.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude"#
The final exams at the end of last year forced me to temporarily stop reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" when I was getting into it. When I wanted to pick it up after the exams, I found that I easily confused the names and relationships of characters like Buendía, Aureliano, Buendía II, and Aureliano II, making it difficult to continue reading. Last week, I read the reading notes of the Reading Club and reviewed this book again, but from a more realistic historical background perspective. I learned about the entanglement of Colombia, Panama, and the United States and the blueprint of the war that Buendía Colonel never escaped from - the Thousand Days' War.
Weekly Gems#
Documentary#
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This year's reading list also includes The Noble Soul. Recently, I saw Chai Jing share the documentary "Zhongyuan Chronicles" about Dr. Gao Yaojie. I plan to watch it during my reading time.
Books#
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Harvard University Press, which previously published "The Age of Deng Xiaoping," has a new book coming out this year, "Zhou Enlai - A Life," which is also worth looking forward to.
Code#
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freeCodeCamp recently released Mastering Behavioral Interviews for Software Developers, which is also a good resource. Especially after participating in several interviews, I feel that foreign companies, under the same level of competence, value the fit between candidates and the existing team more. So understanding these issues will be helpful.
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I also saw someone recommend Command Line Applications in Rust, which has a smoother learning curve. This is perfect because I have been wanting to learn about command-line-related knowledge and automate some daily tasks. This can be a learning resource for me in the future.