Teaching and Mentoring

This seems like a good topic to talk about this week, given that summer is here and I have received my first official intern at my new job. In my almost five years at Amazon, I witnessed five internships seasons, but was never asked to take one on. I certainly did my fair share of helping where I could if we got someone on our team, and it’s no real surprise given my history of teaching and mentoring. And that’s what I’m going to write about today, my experiences with mentoring and why I do it.

I feel like it’s easier to start with the why since that is what has driven the when. Even as early as grade school I knew that I was a teacher at heart. It comes pretty naturally to me and I have no issues with dropping anything I may be currently doing in order to help someone work through a problem. Well, as long as the person asking for the help actually needs it. I do get short sometimes with peers who can’t seem to do things on their own and require constant re-education, but when I know the person is new to something, I can’t help but want to lift them up.

Aside from being really good at it (or so I’ve been told by others), teaching is my form of service that feels the most rewarding. Other people give back by feeding others, sheltering others, fighting for others’ rights, healing others physically and spiritually, etc. And those are all great, but they aren’t for me. I’m okay just giving some money here and there where I think it’s most needed. Teaching though, that’s something I could have made a career out of. Even now, I’m pretty convinced that if I leave the software industry, I’m going to spend my time teaching what I can to others. While I certainly don’t have the time right now, I could even talk myself into adjuncting a class for a local college on top of a regular job.

My initial foray into teaching was simple enough. I don’t remember exactly who approached me about it, whether it was one of the grade school teachers or my parents, but everyone around me knew that I had a brain for mathematics. I was always a grade or two ahead of my classmates. So I was asked if I wanted to run an after-school math class for lower-grade students who were looking to advance beyond their current level. It was only one day a week for a couple months, at least that I can recall, my memory is not great so many years on. But what I do remember is that I had a great time. Planning the lessons, going over how to do things in class, grading papers, all of it. It ended up just being a flash in the pan as there were no follow up classes, but it was a spark of inspiration for me.

From there, pretty much until I graduated college, and even a little bit after that, I was always helping classmates try to understand things that they couldn’t get from the lectures. I never did any official tutoring, but I certainly gave a lot of unofficial sessions. Mostly in calculus, but there were also a lot of computer science topics I could teach because I had prior experience before college that a lot of others didn’t. Especially in classes where the professor obviously had no real world knowledge of what they were teaching (looking at you database administration class).

After college I had no real opportunities to continue tutoring or teaching. During my first couple jobs I was the junior developer on those projects, so I was the one being taught for the most part. But I did get better at explaining myself to peers and getting them to see my way of things. That skill has become super valuable, especially at my current job where I have more sway on policy and direction.

I didn’t get another chance to really teach until Amazon, where I took on more of a mentorship role. While I didn’t get any interns, I did have a couple official mentees, though I wouldn’t say any of them were really that fruitful. I put in a lot of work coming up with mini-lectures and project ideas, but with one exception they all ended before they could get going. The mentorship program there is designed to be driven by the person seeking help, so many people will say they want help but few follow through. That’s just human nature, and also the nature of a workplace where people are crazy busy all the time. So the mentoring was mostly off the books, lending guidance to people on the team who were still new to programming in a real company.

This all leads to now, where I’ve got an intern of my own. It’s a good thing for our team right now because we’re lacking enough development talent to keep up with the pace of the project, and it’s been proving difficult to fill the gap. It’s definitely going to be a lot of work on my head because I have to be there to help and guide him, make time for all my usual work, and I’ve also become the second-in-command for my team, so I have managerial stuff to take care of from time to time too.

Hopefully things will turn out well with my intern. After just a week it’s hard to say what he’ll be able to do in the two months we have him, but he seems to be taking everything in and is eager to make something happen. I’ve done enough work with college students through interviewing and mentoring that I feel like I should be good at assessing where to set stretch goals and where to ease up, and come out at the end with a finished product he can be proud of. We’ll see in August if I’m as good a mentor as I think I am.

Passions and Priorities

There’s still a month before I do my official goals update at the mid-year mark, but I can’t get this idea out my head this week, so here’s a brief post that will act as a precursor to that update. I’ve been doing this focus tracker thing for five months now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t helping in any meaningful way. I’ve also come to the conclusion that it’s wrong to say that I have a focus problem to begin with, it’s really a problem of passions and priorities. Let me try to explain.

First, let’s talk about the problems I’ve been having with the focus tracker I started. Like many other things I’ve tried to do, it was really useful and enlightening for the first couple months. But by March it became obvious that it wasn’t really providing any useful insights into what I was actually doing, aside from seeing if I was reading every day. So I tried to switch it up to assign different projects to different days of the week. That lasted for another couple months until May when I discovered that also wasn’t helping, so I switched it up again to try to do more daily, consistent tasks.

Of course that hasn’t really worked either. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself over the last decade or so is that I’m not programmed for consistent practice of anything. I keep flipping back and forth between consistent practice (shorter periods of time every day) and batch practice (longer periods of time once a week or so), but I can’t do either one well. Yet I continue to try because every single person who’s ever been successful at anything will tell you that you have to do either one to succeed. And I want to be a successful person as much as anyone else, so I keep pushing myself into failure because neither method seems to work.

That’s why I come up with things like the focus tracker. I convince myself that if I track everything and see trends, it will give me more information on what works and the motivation to keep doing it. But it’s an inherently flawed system because it was never a problem with focusing on things in the first place. I am actually very good at focusing on tasks, and can pound away at something for many hours at a time.

The real problem is that focus only comes from passion. And I’m not passionate about very many things. And those passions very rarely match up with my priorities. Therefore, trying to force myself to focus on priorities that are not passions is doomed to fail.

A couple months ago I wrote a post about my perpetual games, those games that I play for years and keep coming back to whenever I can. Those are perfect examples of activities that I am super passionate about, but are super low priorities. For example, I probably put in 20 or so hours into Heroes of the Storm this week, both in playing it and watching videos about it. I think about that game all the time and I want to play it all the time. But I know in my logical mind that spending all my time on that game doesn’t improve me, as a person, in any meaningful way, it just feels good. The same goes with the thousands of hours I put into playing drums in Rock Band or guitar in Rocksmith. Learning to play music is a worthwhile endeavor, but in the grand scheme of things, the time put in hasn’t really justified the outcome.

The thing that really gets me about this is that I should be okay with it. It’s my free time and I should be happy with whatever I do during that time. And while I’m doing those activities, I am happy. It’s only later, when I see how much of the day has gone by, that I get down on myself for not doing other things that have a more tangible reward. Most days I get to the end of the night and the line from Hamilton plays in my head, “He will never be satisfied.” The big difference between me and Mr. Hamilton is that he had the passion to fulfill his ego, I just have the stupid ego.

So after five months, I have to concede that the focus tracker idea was never going to be the tool that gets me motivated to complete more things. It ended up being yet another tool for me to look at and realize how bad I am at doing things I’m not super passionate about. It was definitely the right tool for determining what my priorities should be, but that doesn’t mean much when missing those priorities has no consequence.

The quest to find the right tool for getting those priorities taken care of continues. What I really need is to get those priorities at the same motivation level as these weekly posts. Outside of using my existing tools to remind myself that it needs to be done, I haven’t had any trouble being motivated to write, as long as I have something to write about. But doing other things like reading, playing non-perpetual games, watching new TV shows or movies, cooking, exercising, each one feels like a hassle. And I like doing all those things, I just don’t love them.

The motivation for writing these posts largely comes from the public nature of them. There are enough people reading them that I feel bad when I miss a week. I also get more motivated to clean the house or cook when people are coming over. But I don’t know if I can rely on that same external pressure to read or play games. I guess I could set myself a review schedule so that I had to finish things in order to write about them, but then it becomes like an actual job. Is that what I really want? Of course not. Is there any other way to motivate myself? Probably not.

Ultimately I don’t want to treat leisure time like homework, but my completionist self tends to make it necessary to be satisfied, if only temporarily. It sucks, but that’s just who I am.

Cosmos: 40 Years Later

Yes, the Cosmos I’m referring to this week is Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Specifically I’m talking about the book because I just finished reading it for the first time. One of those backlog items that I’ve had around for years, basically from when I first watched the corresponding show almost a decade ago. It was nice to read the book now because apparently I had forgotten a lot of what the show talked about.

I know it technically hasn’t been 40 years since the book and TV series came out, it’s been 39, but I figure that’s close enough to make the claim. I suspect that come next year, there will be a bunch of articles doing the official 40 year anniversary, and they will probably talk about some of the points I want to bring up today.

As I already said, I either forgot a lot about what the show was about, or some things just didn’t register the same way they did with the book because times have changed a lot since then. I do know that the book and TV shows have differences, but I feel like if I watched the show again it would also land differently.

I remembered most of the science bits, but I also learned a lot of it in school, so that’s not much of a surprise. The only part that was a good refresher was on how different elements are actually made and how they come to be on planets like ours. I also remember the section on how many recent “discoveries” were actually found thousands of years ago, but all of that knowledge was lost due to religious suppression. Even now, just thinking about how much was lost due to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is sad and frustrating. That had a big impact on me the first time around and the book added even more flavor and details.

In terms of things that stood out to me this time around, there are three areas that are worth bringing up.

First, there is a big emphasis on how important it is for the human race to do more things in space. This probably seemed more obvious at the time because back then there was a lot more momentum for doing space projects. That momentum has slackened significantly in the last 40 years, so you don’t hear about the few projects that do exist much unless something novel happens. As such, I’m sure Mr. Sagan would be a little disappointed in how things have gone.

What has happened in the last decade is that private industry has tried to make up for the lack of progress in the public sector (due to lack of funding). Obviously the two you hear the most about are SpaceX and Blue Origin. What is interesting about this development is that, though the technological advances have been amazing, there has been a tremendous amount of backlash against the people running these companies, and subsequently a backlash against the companies themselves and the money being spent on them. The general theme of these criticisms is that the money could be better spent on fixing problems that have more immediate impact on the world we already live on. Other criticisms stem from the founders of these companies being awful people.

It seems very likely that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and others in this industry were inspired by books like Cosmos that pushed the idea that going to space was important for the human race. But was it really the right message when it seems to sacrifice the well-being of Earth in exchange? Maybe not so much. I don’t really have a dog in this fight since I fundamentally believe that people have the right to do what they want with their money, and the technology coming out of these endeavours is objectively good for the world at large, but I do think that the money could be better spent and I would rather see more money put into the public sector where there’s no profit incentive for something so important. I can’t help but feel that Carl Sagan’s dream of humans reaching the stars has been somewhat corrupted by people who have the means to do so, but not the right motives. They come across as rather myopic on the state of the world.

Second, there is a surprising amount of doomsday worries considering how positive the rest of the book is. It shouldn’t be that surprising given the book was written during the Cold War, when nuclear annihilation was still a viable threat. But what’s interesting about it now is that we have sort of come back around in a circle where it might be a viable threat again. After the collapse of the USSR, there were a few decades where we were actively working to fix the problem of having enough nukes to destroy the world hundreds of times over, and no one really gave it another thought. I know I certainly didn’t growing up.

But now, while we are certainly not at the same level of threat as then, people are starting to worry again. We have a lot of unstable leaders right now who have access to those weapons, and it’s not a stretch to think that any one of them could start a war because they need to show the world who is the most insecure about themselves. One would like to hope that cooler heads would prevail and stop that from happening, but we just don’t know.

It stuck out to me how many times the book gives the sentiment of, “it will be incredible when we realize this monumental achievement, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves first.” The book even spends most of a whole chapter talking about nuclear weapons and what it would do to us should they be used. It’s like, I get why it is important to know these things, but it seems out of place with the rest of the book. Still, somebody has to tell it, so I’m actually glad it’s in there. It drives home the point that we as humans are capable of amazing things, but we’re also really dumb about ensuring our own survival.

And speaking of our survival, that leads into the third point, which is that we have done shockingly little to maintain this little planet we live on over the last 40 years. What’s sad about it is that you read books like this and you realize that we have known for decades what we need to do. While Mr. Sagan didn’t call it climate change as we do now, there is a big emphasis in the book about how we need to move towards cleaner sources of energy and do less to destroy the parts of the environment that keep things in balance. Yet here we are, decades later, and very little has actually been done.

Granted, I don’t expect the whole world to just listen to one man and say, “sure, we should do that.” But it wasn’t just him that was ignored, literally everyone has been ignored. For example, there has been some information going around in the last week or so about a study Exxon did back in the early 80s, shortly after this book came out, where the researchers accurately predicted what today’s CO2 levels and average planet temperatures would be. They also mentioned just how bad that would be for the environment. But of course, Exxon being Exxon, did nothing to try to combat that. Making money off of cheap fuel is more important, the environment be damned.

It hurts reading about these warnings being given decades ago, and having to live through the present where it might be too late to fix the problem. Perhaps it is true that any civilization who is smart enough to contemplate the Cosmos is bound to destroy itself before it can actually do something about it.

Anyway, Cosmos is still a good read and still just as poignant as it was back in 1980 when it came out. It’ll be interesting to see where we are 40 years from now and what we will have learned by then. Unless, of course, we destroy ourselves first.

Four-ish Months in NYC (Spring)

For lack of other things to write about this week, time for some more observations on our transition to New York City. There are still a few gaps in the coverage I’ve written about so far, but expect this to be another fairly short one. Maybe next week I’ll have a better topic.

We have reached the middle of Spring at this point, and the weather has gotten nice and warm, which has been very welcome after one of the harsher winters I’ve ever had to live through. If you talk to people who have lived here a while, you find a lot of them will joke that every winter they are so miserable that they want to move, but the rest of the year is so nice that they forget just how miserable it was, so it’s a constant cycle of peaks and valleys. I really only experienced half of the winter here, but I can definitely see how people get that way.

In terms of how the weather here compares to Seattle, there are two things that surprised me. One thing I knew before getting here is that the weather reaches more extremes, but that’s not unusual given that Seattle is known for being temperate. Everywhere is more extreme than Seattle. But the first thing I didn’t expect is that the weather here swings more wildly day to day. The temperature and precipitation in Seattle have a smoothness to them that makes it easy to predict what today will be like based on the last couple days. NYC is not like that at all, I really have to look at the forecast to get an idea of what to expect since it could be sunny and 75, or cloudy and 50, and who the heck knows when rain will come pouring through. But that leads to the second surprise. The weather forecasts here are way more accurate than what I’m used to from the west coast. When the forecast says it will rain for a couple hours, it actually rains for those couple hours and then it’s gone. People who have lived here a while will tell me that the weather forecast is always wrong, but coming from Seattle, I can’t believe how accurate it is.

Also with the coming of nicer weather, that inevitably leads people to want to go outside and hang out more. Biking is a common way of getting around, and it’s likely I will be doing that again for the first time in almost two decades. I’m sure I’ll have a separate post about that. But otherwise, I am realizing just how big a difference it makes when you live in a city with great public transit. I’ve mentioned already in the last couple NYC posts about how much I like it, but it’s worth a little more time since it’s fundamentally the biggest difference for me in my daily life.

It is easy to say that without the subway, NYC would basically cease to function. It is hard to conceptualize just how many people use it at all hours of every day, even when you see how crowded every train and every platform is during rush hour, but it is a lot of people. Without the trains, you are left with cars and buses, and there is simply no way the roads could accommodate the volume. And that is just the subway we’re talking about, that doesn’t include the amount of people who come into the city from the nearby region using the LIRR, Metro-North, New Jersey Transit, PATH, and Amtrak trains.

I heavily rely on the subway, it’s how I get to work every day. We also use it pretty frequently when we want to meet up with friends. It’s so liberating to be in a situation where you and some friends can get brunch together at a place two miles away, and it’s no big deal. It’s something we haven’t really been able to do since we lived on Capitol Hill with all our Seattle friends in the same area, and it worked there because we could walk. It’s the same thing here, but the distances are greater, yet still just as easy. I love that our friend group in Queens can randomly decide to get together during the week and we can just make it happen. This is not to say that never happened in Seattle, getting a drink after work with co-workers happened once in a while. The frequency is just a lot higher now.

I don’t really have anything else to add at this point. As I said, it’s a short one. But I will end by saying that nearly four months in, NYC is finally feeling like home rather than just a long work trip or vacation. For better or worse, we’ve fallen into a consistent routine and we’ve established our favorite food spots in the area. There is certainly a lot more exploring and experiencing to do, and there’s a whole 4-5 months of nice weather coming up in which to do that. So there will definitely be more observations in the future.

Finding Zen in Puzzle Games

As I’ve mentioned multiple times in the past, finding topics is hard, but I’ve had some ideas on the burner for a while. One of them was to talk about Baba Is You, a push puzzle game that came out about two months ago. The reason I thought it would be interesting to talk about in a post is that it is a very interesting and clever game. But, I haven’t put any real time into it, it’s one of those games where it hasn’t clicked, so I have kind of given up on it. I may return to it in the future if I feel the itch, but for now it’s sitting tight on the backlog.

What made me decide to switch gears and do a general topic on puzzle games as a whole is that this week a new picross game, Picross S3, came out on Switch, which I instantly bought and I’ve already finished. As suggested by the name, this is the third game in a series of picross games on the Switch, and each one has more content than the previous one. Though it has gotten easier for me to do the puzzles with each installment, each of these games takes 40-50 hours to 100%, so it’s a hefty time investment.

So… why am I obsessed with these games when Baba Is You, an objectively better game in all respects, didn’t grab me?

I thought about it for a bit, and I came to a conclusion that was kind of surprising to me. As a genre of games, I’ve always loved puzzle games, it’s a staple of mine along with RPGs, platformers, rhythm games, and (some) shooters. But I didn’t fully realize until this week that I play puzzle games to zone out, to enter a zen of sorts. I get into a state of flow and if the puzzles maintain that state, I just keep going and going. If I get frustrated at all with puzzles that I’m trying to solve, I bounce off it right away because that’s just not what I’m looking for.

So games like picross and sudoku, which are puzzles of numbers and simple logic rules, fall into that camp of zen. There are definitely some that get frustrating because there are no obvious moves at a certain point, but filling in the grids is mostly relaxing and allows me to engage part of my brain while the rest engages in something else. Listening to a podcast or audiobook while doing picross or sudoku is perfect.

Baba Is You, on the other hand, gets really tough, really quick. It requires too much brain power and focus for me to enjoy for long stretches of time. I can appreciate it for what it is, but it relies too heavily on the shotgun approach and the cost of messing up can be high. I know that it’s a staple of a lot of puzzle games, but if my only path forward is to just guess and see what happens, that’s not something I’m going to enjoy.

There’s probably another reason why I don’t enjoy puzzle games that require a lot of thought, and that’s because I already put a lot of brain power into solving problems with my job. When I get home, my brain power is already drained, so it just wants to do something easy. There is an exception to this, namely the games made by Zachtronics. Their games, such as Space Chem, TIS-100, Opus Magnum, and Shenzhen I/O, appeal to me because they require the same kind of machine-building logic that I use in my normal work. It’s the same skills, but applied in a very different way. It’s the same reason why I also program in my spare time, but I focus on problems completely different from what I do at work. I do what I do because I enjoy doing it, but I want to use those skills in settings that don’t feel like work, so these puzzle games let me do that. Of course, I never play these after work, they are strictly a weekend sort of thing.

Another thing I find is that I really like puzzle elements in other games, whether it is an integral part of the gameplay itself or as a break in the normal gameplay to do something else. The latter tends to happen in action games, like God of War or Uncharted, where the player needs a breather between fights, so they put in a couple easy puzzles to break up the set pieces. The former usually comes in the form of strategy or tactics games.

I’m traditionally not much of a strategy game player, but I have enjoyed the small bites I’ve taken over the years, and it’s an area I want to get into more. Other friends I know love strategy games like Advance Wars, Valkyria Chronicles, Civilization, XCOM, etc., but I haven’t really played any of them. I’ve done a little Civilization V and I really liked playing Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle last year, which is XCOM-like. My history tends to favor games that are not strategy at their core, but have some strategic elements within it, like Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, which I talked about at length earlier this year. It’s not much of a traditional game since you don’t do a whole lot in it, but strategy is a big element when it comes to creating the most optimal formation for the situation at hand. Finding those optimal moves is inherently pleasing to me, which is found in a lot of games, whether they are heavier on strategy or tactics.

I think at the end of the day, the thing that will turn me off of a puzzle game most is when I have to guess to advance. I like games where the puzzles are tough, but can be figured out through small, logical steps. Having a quick way to recover from mistakes is also a big plus, since starting an entire puzzle over after spending 15 minutes or more on it is super frustrating, but that is true of pretty much any game. I’m not the type of player who enjoys banging my head against a wall for hours to get over a challenge. I will leave that for others to enjoy and keep my zen experiences.