It’s been a long, long time since I’ve posted anything on this website. I could find countless excuses for that, but overall it should not have happened.
I’ve spent the past six months on campus in Hong Kong, and it was “a fruitful time, but not completely fruitful”. Upon arrival, I was expecting a proper university life with motivation and some grand goals. I would listen to every single word professors say on Zoom classes, go to the library with my laptop every day, and have a healthy proportion of social life. Pathetically, none of the above was realised, and the dormitory room was the place I spent most of my time in.
I’d dreamed about being a better coder or even a decent developer. I would leave the failure in the world of competitive programming behind, jump out of my comfort zone of ideal algorithm design and learn more about real-world software, just like my old teammate Wong did – we collaborated on a project called Helios two years ago, and I cannot understand all of the source code today. I was proud of this project, of course, and could exaggerate about that whole day. However, now I’m ashamed of not contributing that much and not studying Golang earlier, sort of. On a larger scale, I’m more embarrassed by resting on my past achievements as they are getting more and more modest each day.
Being aware of these and doing nothing is painful – I’m living on my fat, sadly lacking behind, and not self-motivated enough to do something about the status quo. Yes, I’m trying my best to change that – even though I spend more than needed on Control and Netflix. I’m picking up Golang once again and using Github to let everyone moderate my progress. I’m doing summer research on cryptography and blockchain to push myself into the realm of the combination of academic study and actual application.
To be honest, it is PAINFUL. Maybe sometimes growing is entitled to be this way.