Like the beginning of a new relationship, everything can be exciting and unknown, we are waking up to new possibilities and opportunities, living at the edge of the present moment.

If you can hold off on your routine, rest in this lingering dreamy state, and feel it out, well, you might discover something about yourself.

Feel it out

Check-in with your state of mind. How well rested are you? Don’t measure your sleep in time alone, the body is always honest about how well it could support your adventures today. If you feel a little off, worry not, you have the whole day ahead of you to improve and prepare for a better morning that is just around the corner.

Take care of priorities

Whatever your current fitness goal is, there is no reason you can’t get a head start in the morning. Doing a few sets of pushups, do some stretches, hang on a bar for a minute or two. Look for some familiarity with your body; it had supported your endeavours yesterday and came through the workout with you. Find your baseline for the day, and prepare for the continuation of yesterday’s work.

I know I am not the most qualified, have limited of experience under my belt, and are lightyears away from becoming a genuine hacker who can make monoliths for fun.

However, I do believe there is something in me that might make someone want to hire me. What I cannot prove with my technical skills, I can prove with my character.

How I work

I understand the importance of being right, and the fact that it is not always the goal in software engineering. Sometimes good solutions are built on a foundation that can be improved, saving time and money.

Product requirements can often come at me wrapped in a ball of yarn, I unravel them with intention and care, then knit a nice sweater using my intuition and understanding. I will check in for things I do not understand, I will use AI to optimize the workflow, and most important of all, I never deliver before testing and validating the product myself.

Features I ship are made to impress, to provide a good experience for the user and the person developing it.

My plans

This is only the first year where I am working fulltime as a SWE. I want to keep improving myself and expand my technical knowledge zone, be better at what I already do well, then maybe start my own small business to serve customers in a few years, if such opportunities arise.

Stronger than any venom, taking over.

Like shadows, inseparable. Hypnotized.

There is no cure, for it is a curse.

II.

Blew together by a breeze, two hearts tremble.

Cozy and warm, taking shelter from the noise.

Here, they are safe. Free to explore.

III.

No longer between two, everything is as one.

Hot like the sun, cold like snow flakes.

Runs like water, still like tree.

Ephemeral clouds, solid bedrocks.

Breathes in, pause, and out.

Vibrating and sensing.

For what seems like eternity when there is no time.

Everything we do is for selfish reasons. This is a fact, and it is liberating once you understand it. Any expectation for someone to perform a selfless act is an illusion, and anyone thinking that they do things for selfless reasons is a fool. Human beings are constantly building and exchanging, as this is inline with the entropy laws of the universe. Every act we perform is the outward expression of the intention behind that act, and there is no getting around this.

The significance of coming into terms with one’s own selfishness is that, we no longer get caught up on why we do what we do, it lets us maintain awareness of actions as well as intentions. Here are a few examples:

I haven’t talked to anyone in a while, I need to connect with someone I trust so that I feel happier.

I need to show up at work today, because my livelihoods depends on taking on the responsibility of the thing that is required of me at work today, so that I am financially secure.

I don’t want to feel attached to this person, so I let them go for my own sanity.

Coming into terms with it will bring a plethora of benefits, because we bond with universal truths about the human condition, meaning that we are coming out of the many illusions of the ego. And as a result, we become unwavering in doing what we want to do, decide for ourselves, and take control of our mind and body.

Letting things take turn, a disaster may come, the vicissitudes of life will arrive. It doesn’t change the fact that we want to be happy, be healthy, and be present.

Change is everywhere, it’s the only constant. The weather on Earth, the relationships between people, your self image, nothing is ever the same for even just a split second. You cannot step into the same river twice, because the second time your foot enters the water, the river that flew has already moved on and is replaced by a new current.

When the sage points towards the moon, all that people saw was the finger. Observe change with your own eyes. If you have the patience to read this far, you may well have the conscience to observe change in every faucet of life.

Every reaction we have towards these changes that are bound to happen is the completion of a circuit. The electricity of emotions and actions that takes course doesn’t happen unless our reaction to the event is provided to form a closed circuit.

If we can maintain awareness of the event and observe our natural response or emotion before reacting to the event, we can process the event with all of our might and perform the necessary action, rather than an reaction.

Anicca, Anicca.

Long periods of computer use has caused my lower back to have a really limited range of motion, as well as an inflexible hip and hamstring. I cannot do a forward fold while sitting on sit bones on the floor, because my hips simply won’t bend, and I have to hold myself upright using my core muscles, tensing my body everywhere.

After seeking counsel from the Yoga instructor after attending an in person Flow class one day, I asked him how I should stretch. And he gave me the following tips:

• Bend your knees as much as necessary.
• Keep your chest close to your thighs.
• Focus on folding from the hips rather than rounding the lower back.
• Let the hamstrings gradually lengthen over time.
• Do not force the legs straight.
• Use a folded blanket or block under your sit bones if that helps you tilt the pelvis forward.

The instructor who told me this repeatedly said:”You will be able to forward fold one day, you will eventually get there, don’t force anything.” Then he said:”You feel like a person who is very long-term thinking to me.”

I didn’t think about telling him at the moment, but that interaction made my day.

Coming out of my shell to speak to people’s heart, not just people’s minds, takes practice. Just like forward folding.

So I built Karma Coding for myself. It is a small file-system practice system, and its one idea is that every hint points back to your own past solutions — a knowledge graph built from code you have already written.

Each challenge lives in its own folder: a challenge.md describing the problem, an input.txt and expected.txt for testing, and a test.sh runner. Nothing exotic. The hints are where it gets personal. Every hint names a technique you used in a previous challenge you already solved, references that exact folder, and leaves a spot to paste in your own code from that solution. For example, a hint for a string problem might remind you of the hash set you wrote in Contains Duplicate, and ask how you could count character frequencies with the same pattern.

The hints never hand you the answer. Because the code in them is yours, you can’t skim past it. The mentor in this system is your past self.

The test runner is deliberately dumb. It finds whatever solution file you wrote, pipes the input in, and compares the output to the expected result. Pass or fail, then back to the problem.

And there are no scores, no streaks, no leaderboard — the practice is the point.

The name comes from Karma Yoga: acting wholeheartedly, without attachment to the result. That is the intention behind the whole thing, and it is a practice I can keep showing up for.

You can checkout the project here: https://github.com/dong0085/karma-coding

I can still recall a conversation with my professor last December. I was always rushing for results in anything I do at the time, and he offered the perspective to think about practicing meditation (and perhaps anything) as investing for compound interest.

Months have passed since then and I am happy with the incremental growths I made over time; the understanding from looking inward, and slowly coming out of illusions to wake up to reality.

The work I have done boils down to:

• live with change
• accept and contemplate death
• let go of things I cannot control

The world becomes a lot purer and interesting, because I can finally appreciate people and things for what they are, and not for what they seem to be.

Suddenly I find myself no longer getting caught up in many interpersonal relationship struggles I have had before by simply observing and being present. And this has allowed me to reserve my energy for things that really matter to me.

to be continued…

Long time ago, I wanted to build a blog

The blogging world was Scary. But I pushed on.

Somehow I found some hope

And I decided to do it!