Category: Personal Development
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Harry Mack on mastery, art of practicing, and flow state
I recently listened to a podcast episode by Harry Mack — a very gifted freestyle rap artist — named “Flow State” and I want to share a few key insights I took away regarding the art of practice. Though the discussion around his beliefs and advice revolve around freestyle rapping, I believe the principles can…
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House Dance Private with Ani
I took a private house dance lesson with Ani and below is a 30 second clip condensed version of our 1 hour private. I had originally reached out to her and asked for a private lesson after struggling in her House Beginner/Intermediate class. In particular, I fumbled with the pas de bourree torso isolation as…
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House Dance Reflection and Review: Jevan (August 15, 2024)
Took the class yesterday night and while still fresh in my mind, brain dumping. Best part of the class for me was witnessing my freestyle classmate light up with joy midway through her freestyle round when she went for a move, caught a groove, and her face beamed up. Note: As usual, I’m recalling the…
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House Dance Class (August 13, 2024) – Review and Reflection
Below is a short review and recap of Ani’s house dance class (beginner/intermediate) that takes place in London every Tuesday night at 6:00pm over at Pineapple Studio. Though I enjoy taking this class every Tuesday, this instance of the class was special because my friend Will (from Seattle, who was visiting London) joined me and…
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House Dance Class Recap – Review and Reflection
Class Details Location: Base Dance Studios (in London, by Vauxhall station)Date/Time: August 08, 2024 @ 5:30pm-6:55pm (85 minutes)Overall class difficulty: 5 out of 10Combo difficulty: 6 out of 10Freestyle exercise? Yes Overview This blog post serves multiple purposes. First, it helps me experience gratitude. Attending this class is one of the ways I squeeze in…
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Top 5 Zettelkasten.de forum posts
I’m obsessed with personal information management (PIM) and as I learn more about the discipline, one concept continues to repeatedly crop up: Zettelkasten. I first learned about Zettelkasten after reading one of my favorite books “How to take smart notes”, and since then, I’m sold on the idea and continue to tweak my digital workflow…
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Failure: I want more of it.
Students in the Georgia Tech program collaborate with one another — and collaborate with professors and teacher assistants — through a platform called Piazza. But at the end of the semester, this forum shuts off to read only mode, meaning we all lose connection with one another. Because of this, I recently created an e-mail…
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20s for education, 30s for experience, 40s for career.
In my mid twenties, I was blessed to receive some of the best career, and quite frankly, life advice. During that period of my life, I was working as a director of technology, leading a small group of engineers. But I was getting ready to throw in the towel. I lacked both the experience and…
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Don’t break the (writing) chain … has been broken
This week, my cumulative “write every day” streak has been broken (almost 2 months of consistent writing every day), thanks to one of the roughest weeks at work. I normally start every day off with some light blogging — even if its for 5 or 10 minutes — but almost every day this week I…
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Distancing oneself from a difficult problem
I fixed a silly bug just now and wrote working code that can pin multiple virtual CPUs to the physical CPUs. Identifying the bug in my code was another classic example of how I needed to distance myself from the problem. Instead of staying up late into the night (late is now 09:30 pm on…
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A No-Excuses Guide to Blogging – Excuse #5 – “I don’t want to be wrong”
Many people (including myself) fear that we will be perceived as a fool if we publish on a post blog that contains a mistake, a public mistake. Nobody wants to be humiliated publicly. This fear is encapsulated inside of a quote that Sacha shares: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to…
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Waiting for one day …
“If you want to be successful, find out what the price is and then pay it.” Scott Adams I agree with that Scott Adams wholeheartedly. I also think this rule can be more broadly applied: “If you want something — anything — find out what the price is and then pay it.” This quote reminds…
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Almost half way through M.S. in Computer Science
I’m almost half way through the OMSCS (online masters in computer science), last week marking the end Spring 2020, my third term in the program. And although I’m looking forward to taking compilers next semester, my mind often wanders into the distant future , my mind fast forwarding to the time in which I’ll be…
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Tennis serve in slow motion
Last week, with just my iPhone and a camera tripod, I recorded myself hitting tennis balls launched by the ball machine and recording myself smacking a few serves. The idea of recording myself was inspired from several articles that I had read from tennisplayer.net. To elaborate, I wanted to objectively analyze my tennis strokes —…
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Blistered fingers
When I first started playing ukulele, about six months ago, I would occasionally wince when lifting my fingers off of the nylon strings. Because in the beginning, the flesh of my fingertips were fresh, no callouses. But slowly, over time, after repeatedly striking down on the strings, my fingers gave birth to a new layer…
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Learning a new language
I studied Spanish in high school for four years and 10 years later, I’m embarrassed that I can’t form a comprehensible or grammatically correct sentence. I traveled throughout Europe last Christmas and was impressed by the number of bilinguals. Most people fluently spoke a combination of English, French and German. My second language, Vietnamese, however,…
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Putting your mentor on a pedestal
Last night, I presented (deckslide here) on AWS Lambda at DevOps London Exchange. I really enjoy public speaking, but it wasn’t always that way. In fact, I used to hate it – feared it. I vividly remember an embarassing instance in high school Spanish. My classmate and I had to do a presentation. I got…