Matt Chung's Site

Category: Mental Health

Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/08

The most interesting side effect of writing these daily reviews is that they stir up meaningful conversations with my wife. Apparently, much of what words I set on paper never make their way out of my mouth (despite thinking that I did verbally share them). Surely this situation of my brain tricking me into thinking that I already communicated something is not unique to me, right?

This disconnect between what I thought I said and what I actually said makes me wonder how often I fail to articulate the thoughts running through my mind.

Yesterday

Writing

Shared quotes that I captured while watching an inspirational video created by Veritasium, the YouTube video titled “My Life Story”

Published my notes on “Introduction to Virtualization”

Best part of my day

“I have not just a house, but a home, a home filled with love”

Blinds up means Elliott is awake!

The best part of my day is looking through the living room window and seeing Elliott (bouncing up and down) and Jess cradling her, the two of them standing on the couch and waving at me as I pulled up in the drive way around 7:00 am, around the time when I return from walking the dogs in the morning. Normally, our living room blinds sit shut and we only pull them up during the day when Elliott is awake because our miniature Australian Shepherd tends to bark at every person and crow walking up and down our (busy) hill. So seeing the blinds open as I park the car reminds me that I have not just a house, but a home filled, a home filled with love.

Graduate School

Started watching the lecture series on “Shared Memory Machines”. Much of the material is review (from operating systems and compilers and high performance architecture) but I like the feeling of drilling the same material multiple times because every time I revisit these topics, I understand them just a little more, gaining a tad more intuition of computer science.

Organization

Dynamo LetraTag – cheap $25.00 label maker that I tossed into the bin

I ended up throwing away the $25.00 label maker that I purchased from Target a couple days ago. The device landed in the bin because the paper cutter kept jamming after every other printed label. Not wanting to waste money, I spent about 10 minutes disassembling the device, unscrewing the mini Phillip screw drivers screwed in on the back, but trying to fix the label maker was a lost cause so I ended up purchasing a higher quality Brother Label Maker that runs about $100.00 (a heavy duty case included). Sure, it is a bit expensive for a label maker but I believe in paying for quality, paying for items that should last a life time (if they are maintained properly), instead of buying lots of cheap items that get tossed out.

Work

Mostly took care of administrative items, like scheduling meetings that I’ve been dragging my feet on. I feel like the first day of the week, I’m normally the most unproductive and have to ease my way into the work week. No exception to yesterday.

In addition to tackling those low hanging fruit, I met with other teams within AWS to help root cause some packet loss within the EC2 network.

Today

Writing

Publish notes taken from watching yesterday’s lectures (or lectures from a few days ago)

Organization

Review OmniFocus’s forecast tab to get a sense of what meetings I have this week and any items that are due soon

Graduate School

Wrap up the lectures on “Shared memory” (should take another 30 minutes)

Start writing some prototype code for collecting virtual memory statistics as part of memory coordinator project (hopefully can squeeze in about an hour of concentrated focus while Jess continues with the night time routine, which starts with Elliott and I bathing in the tub.

Mental and Physical health

Attend weekly psychotherapy session. Outside of seeing my therapist (Roy), I realize I rarely talk to anyone (apart from my wife) for an extended period of time. I’m wondering how I will continue these sessions when I move to Renton … we’ll find out in a couple weeks.

Work

Operational ticket bash. Our ticket queue is trending towards triple digits so our team will be dedicating the day to closing as many tickets as possible. This is the first ticket bash I don’t expect these dedicated days to become a habit.

Family

Tell Jess I love her. Same with Elliott. And the puppies So easy to go throughout the day forgetting how blessed I am. Should do the same thing with the rest of my family members and friends too.

September 9, 2020
Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/07
Yesterday

Writing
- Blogged and published an entry describing my naive scheduler for project 1
Emotions
- I disassociated and my mind wandered into its “own world” after my wife Jess asked me to watch Elliott later that afternoon. I think part of the reason why I got so worked up had less to do with her request (cause I actually had a blast with Elliott for that 1 hour) and had to do more with an uneasy feeling caused by my being “stuck” on the school project, which translated to “I have a lot to do with no little time”
What am I grateful for?
- The fact that Jess and I can work through conflict and continue as a couple to develop ways to flesh out issues. Our system is not perfect. I like to disconnect and gather my thoughts. She likes to talk issues through and resolve them then and there. We’re meeting somewhere in the middle.
Physical and Mental Health

Elliott and daddy and boeing creek park
- Hiked with the dogs and Elliott (who sat on top of my shoulders most of the walk) and Jess at Boeing creek park, a hidden gem. That park and its thousands of 100 feet ever green trees makes you feel as if you teleported to another world, a world that reminds you how beautiful and how strong nature is. We had witnessed the powerful wind knock down one of the trees and reminded how, as humans, little we are and how we should respect nature
Music
- Came up with another beautiful sounding harmony (basically a I-IV-I-V-III-IV progression) that I should capture in my voice notes (will do that shortly)
Graduate School
- Finished up the majority of part 1 of my project, writing a scheduler in C that balances virtual CPUs on physical CPUs running on my Xen server. Only piece remaining is adding a “stabilization” feature that does not shuffle CPUs around. This should take maybe another hour of focused attention
- Read the requirements for part 2 of the project, which sounds like I’ll be emulating a “balloon” driver, a driver that expands and contracts depending on whether the system as a whole needs more or less memory, respectively
- Finished watching the lengthy video series on “CPU & Device Virtualization”
- Began watching an even lengthier video series on “Shared Memory Machines”
Organization
- Culled all the lingering, unread (and read) e-mails sleeping in my inbox. Amazing how many e-mails that I do not read so I unsubscribed from quite a few newsletters and disabled e-mail forwarding on my undergraduate academic address since I receive nothing but warning notifications around tornado weather
Work
- Nothing. At all. Thanks to the three day weekend (appreciate it labor day)
Friends and Family
- Finally remembered (thanks to revising my to do list for the day) to video call my Grandma, who hasn’t seen Elliott for a couple months now.
- Watched Elliott for an hour while Jess ran off to her appointment. Most memorable moment as a father was seeing Elliott stand up (she’s getting so good at holding this position) and with a little assistance (her gently resting her palm in mine) took one of her first steps. Who would’ve known something so little sparks so much joy
- Packed and taped up our first moving box, the box filled with all sorts of textbooks that were previously sitting on our bookshelf. Oh yea, also off the kitchen table and carried it outside, placing the table in the front yard so that anybody can pick it up (for free). These little moving victories helps me feel as if we are gaining traction and momentum with this major house move
Miscellaneous
- Talked on the phone for 45 minutes with our Loan Broker, who did an excellent job describing the different roles and parties involved in a home purchase transaction. So many terms I was unfamiliar with including: the broker, the lender, the underwriter, the title company, the escrow company. More on this on a separate blog post
Word of the day

reprisal actions on the part of his troops were brought to his notice in reports made to him

Definition

Reprisal – noun – an act of retaliation.

Today

Writing
- Publish post on notes from graduate school and/or a post on how my C skills have sharpened thanks to self studying, graduate school, switching teams at Amazon (2 years ago)
Organization
- Review OmniFocus’s forecast tab to get a sense of what meetings I have this week and any items that are due soon
Graduate School
- Continue watching lecture on “Shared memory”
Mental and Physical health
- Run for 5-10 minutes (not much but these little minutes add up) since I’ve been feeling sluggish lately and tired of seeing my belly begin to sag over my waist (physical activities are just unnecessarily harder when you pack on a few pounds)
Work
- Send e-mail to three senior engineers who will be participating in my panel
- Send meeting invite with Rahul so that they can share their presentation with me, the one that will take place in the first 10 minutes of my panel discussion
Family
- Check in with Jess since she’s right: I review my days and plan out the next ones so meticulously but fail to include her (and others) as part of my daily equation. My argument was that she’s so important and implicitly included as part of my day. But is that true? Not sure if I buy my own excuse so I’ll sit and muse on the idea.
- Review my list of “Contacts” since I haven’t touched base with many people — friends or family — since COVID-19 hit. Actually, COVID-19 has nothing to do with the fact that I rarely reach out to people. I’m so insular and in my “own world” and it’s easy to forget to reach out to loved ones
September 8, 2020
Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/09/06

Writing

I’m getting much more comfortable with publishing blog posts that are not completely polished. The fear of letting the world see less my less the perfect propose is utter non-sense. In fact, writing and publishing frequently offers two benefits. The first is that the sheer act of writing and setting words on (digital) paper improve my craft. The second benefit of producing words on a regular cadence allows me to track my writing progression, allowing me to critique my writing over time.

Music

The trio hanging out at magnuson park

Although I didn’t put in much deliberate practice for neither singing or guitar (apart from practicing a singing the minor scale), I did sing for Elliott almost every night while bathing her, singing “What a wonderful world”. That’s the good stuff, the whole point of developing music skills, right ?

Graduate School

Graduate school eats up a good majority of my free time. My studies take place before work, early in the morning, around 04:30 to 05:00 AM, and after work (around 06:00 pm). In total, I get about 2 hours a day, sometimes 3 if I am lucky.

And when it comes to the advanced operating systems course I am taking right now, there’s never a moment of rest, almost some task to make forward progress on: from reading papers (e.g. “OS Structure – SPIN”), to watching lectures (e.g. “memory virtualization”) to writing code (i.e. a scheduler and memory coordinator).

But I’m doing my best with the limited amount of time I have and even tracking my progress by publishing my notes from lectures and publishing questions I face and publishing technical problems that I am facing while writing code my project. All of these posts, I hope, will allow me to look back at the end of the semester (about three and a half months away) and feel proud of work I put in and the knowledge I gained.

Organization

Current system for organization and time management broke down. The fact that a few items slipped reinforces the fact that the tools (e.g. excel, OmniFocus) do not guarantee organization: it’s the habits and processes. The tools are only a piece of the puzzle, not the solution.

I had missed a couple appointments and missed a couple important tasks — I hate that feeling. One reason for forgetting about these events is because I failed to book the appointment in my calendar. Another reason is that although some of the events were in my calendar, I didn’t review my calendar and didn’t receive notifications of the event. Looking back, I can think of a couple ways to fix this. The first is to make sure that for any time sensitive tasks (or tasks with due dates), I need to plug that into my calendar right away. That’s step one. The second step is to enable notifications by configuring the event to notify my phone in advance: 1 week in advanced, 1 day in advanced and then 1 hour in advanced.

House Organization

Even though we’re moving into a larger home with more space, I fear that our abysmal home cleaning and organizational skills will follow us (which they will). I’m doing my best to view the dirty home as an opportunity but it’s hard not to feel like my life is spinning out of control when our kitchen looks like this:

Messy Kitchen (2020-09-05)

Granted, our lives changed dramatically when our daughter was born … but that was almost a year ago. So that grace period, I think, has passed. The sad reality is that we’re … extremely messy and disorganized. What is it going to take to keep the house in order?

And as I mentioned in “I’m a messy person: it’s time for a change” post, I’m sick and tired of not my items buried underneath one or another and just overall mountains of junk piling up everywhere throughout the house; this is not the environment in which I want my children to grow up in.

Physical and Mental Health

Physical health has taken a back seat and I definitely want to carve out time (even if it is 5 minutes a day) to get my heart pumping. Working from home in the midst of COVID-19 has definitely contributed to lack of exercise for me — some folks have gotten into tip top shape during the lockdowns.

But I did attend my weekly therapy session and I hope that I can somehow continue seeing my therapist (same person I’ve seen for over four years on a weekly basis) even though I’m moving to Renton, making the commute to his office unsustainable. Let’s see how this all plays out in the about 3 weeks, once my wife and I move.

September 6, 2020
Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/08/31
Yesterday

Most interesting part of yesterday was a 1 on 1 video Chime chat that my co-worker scheduled with me. What started off with me stepping through our code base (for a set of features I added to the dataplane) morphed into a lengthy discussion around mental health and burning out and the idea of feeling confident in our own abilities. They had shared with me that they were starting to feel physically ill and after paying visits to the doctor for a full body check up, they discovered their symptoms manifest from mental health issues.

I’m very familiar with these feelings and can empathize.

In turn, I shared that I prioritize mental health and well being above all else and that I attend weekly therapy sessions (for the past four years) to deal with very similar issues that they are encountering: learning how to set boundaries, learning how to believe in oneself (i.e. imposter syndrome). It’s not as if I’ve completely overcome and mastered these problems; in fact, I wrestle with these issues — every day — but I now have have tools and data points to support me.

Although I love working as a software engineer, I sometimes wonder if I would pivot into a position or line of work where I can directly help people. It feels meaningful.

Writing
- Kept up with my writing cadence, publishing two small blog posts (a daily review and summary notes for the SPIN operating system structure)
Music
- Sang and played my own original guitar song I titled “Elliott’s in the house” for little Elliott while she was bouncing up and down on the couch while dinner, her mom guiding spoon fulls of avocado and noodles in her dime sized mouth
Graduate School
- Read first paper “SPIN”, performing a first pass on the paper (good to reinforce the learning material since there’s so much information packed into the lectures)
- Finished watching lectures on “Introduction to Virtualization” (learned that with paravirtualization, less than 2% code modification is necessary to integrate nicely with the underlying hypervisor)
Work
- Represented my team at the weekly operations meeting for my organization, stepping through all the high severity issues that I encountered and how they affected our metrics
- Finished a first draft of my design document, a paper that I am presenting to my organization today
- Met with a colleague of mine and confirmed that he will be participating in my fireside chat that I am organizing on behalf of Asians@ Amazon (I’m on the professional and development committee)
Family
- Gathered all the necessary documents (e.g. 2 months of pay stubs, last 2 years of W-2, etc) to submit to our lender since we needed to send an offer in for a house by today and needed a preapproval letter.
Today

Organization
- Plan day and week out by reviewing OmniFocus forecast events
- Process e-mail inbox down to zero
- Migrate sticky notes (written down while walking dogs in the morning) into writing tracker and OmniFocus
Graduate School
- Begin second series of lectures for advanced operating systems, lectures on “Memory Virtualization” (exciting stuff, I think)
Work
- Polish one pager design document for work and present
- Review dashboard in preparation for organization wide, weekly operations meeting
Family
- Morning routine of walking dogs at local Northacres park, blending a strawberry and banana smoothie (wait: no much coconut milk so that’s out of the question), eating lunch together, bathing Elliott as part of her night time routine
- Put together loan documents so that we can get a pre-approval for house that we are putting an offer in
Word of the day

insolent – adjective (adj) – showing a rude and arrogant lack of respect.

My strict teacher does not tolerate insolent behavior in her classroom

What are you grateful for?

I’m glad I’m writing down what I’m grateful for because its so easy for me to get trapped inside my own brain, my own world, when work (on call specifically) feels like a tornado.
- Jess being an amazing mom (so patient, so communicative) and leading parenting my example
Feelings
- I had lamented and avoided writing a paper at work and realized, after setting ink on paper for just a few minutes, I actually enjoyed the task but had to overcome my own fear of “not knowing enough” or “looking stupid” in front of my colleagues
- As mentioned above in the summary, I feel good when I can help and serve others. Not in a purely intellectual way, but mentally and emotionally. This is important and perhaps will steer me in a new (or same or different) direction with my career
September 1, 2020
My time management tip #1 – Pomodoro Technique
Since the pandemic hit the states back in February this year, I’ve been working remotely from home (such a blessing and a serious privilege). Working from home underscores the importance of time management, especially for someone like me who can either deeply fall into work mode for hours and hours (never breaking eyes away from screen) or scroll mindlessly on websites like Hacker News or Reddit. The former melts my mental health and the latter kills my productivity.

So to avoid either scenario — working too long or not working at all — I employ a Pomodoro technique¹. The pomorodoro technique, which I picked up years ago when taking Learning How to Learn Course on Coursera, was invented in the early 1990s by Franscesco Cirillo. The basic premise is this: you set a timer for 25 minutes and work deeply for those 25 minutes. Once the alarm sounds, you break. The idea is that the technique improves your focus and promotes giving your brain some time off to relax.

So how do I use the Pomorodo technique in practice? What does it look like?

I use a kitchen timer, the TIMER YS-390 to be specific. This model hits all of my own personal requirements. The device has a dual count timer. I set the top timer to 50 minutes (my personal period of deep focus) and the bottom for 10 minutes; the 10 minutes is my grace period, allowing me to ease into my work (basically I cut myself some slack here). In addition to the dual timers, the alarm’s volume can be adjusted: no sound, low, high. I typically set the volume knob on low as to not frighten my daughter awake when she’s sleeping (my dentist’s rule: never wake a sleeping baby). And finally, the third feature I love is the physical cue. When either of the timers hit zero, the little button begins flashing red like a cop car. This makes it difficult to ignore and I find it really forces my eyes to break away from the screen.

So what happens when the timer sounds the alarm? I start by silencing it, hitting the silicone start/stop button, stepping away from the computer and if I’m lucky enough, take a 5-10 minute break with either my baby daughter (who is growing up way too fast) or wife or dogs (or if I’m really lucky, all four of them). This break, is also no exception, but instead of using my TIMER YS-390, I set a countdown alarm on my G-Shock watch.

Do I always break at the very moment the alarm sounds?

No. Sometimes I find that I’m really in the flow (for work or for graduate school or for writing on this blog) so what I do instead is quickly press the bottom right button, resetting the 10 minute timer. This allows me another grace period of deep work. It’s okay to not be so rigid and cut yourself some slack.

References
August 29, 2020