End of the Year Roundup

December 6, 2024

Introduction

Well, well, well, if it isn't the perfect time to deliver an update despite not being super consistent in updating this space. 2024 marked my first whole year in true unemployment. While I had geared up to re-enter the job market at the turn of the year, life had different plans for me.

Earlier this year, I held down the fort at my parent's business while they returned to their home country to take care of their grandparents. Working at a service level again really put into perspective how far I had came along in my entire career history; you're never too old to be humbled once again working service. What this actually affected was time put into DSA, personal projects, etc., resulting in a pretty late start to the job search. Below, I want to break down how this year went regarding those topics.

DSA, a.k.a., LeetCode

I believe my earlier attempts to "grind" LeetCode were rather inefficient. Just blindly doing problems, whether formatted in LC 75, HackerRank lists, etc., did not provide the results I was looking for. It wasn't until I discovered NeetCode, who broke down the most effective manner in tackling problems. This breakdown, as well as properly tracking time, pass/fail, and recording takeaways resulted in more effective practice. One of my recent interviews was with a MAANG-company, and I was proud that my score improved rather dramatically compared to what I recalled from previous tests.

Personal Projects

One of my core goals this year was to deploy a project across multiple public clouds in order to emulate a production environment.

The biggest project I wanted to have done was a proper sandbox to intermittent QA to production GitHub Actions pipeline that would emulate a real production stack. The value in doing this at a non-production level cannot be understated; reducing second-guessing on whether a change would broadly affect production enables swift delivery and drastically lowers time-to-production by a significant margin. While most people default to pushing to main (I am guilty of this) on personal projects, it's important to maintain proper Git etiquitte for the future.

Job Search