Kurumi writes

Highlights

• I WAS HOSPITALIZED FOR 10 DAYS
  • My gut had severe inflammation, and I had to go through fasting treatment.
  • The doctors and nurses who treated me were real professionals. I learned a lot from their work attitude.
    • The nurses’ communication skills are simply amazing. They adjust their language, tone, topics to individual patients.
      • I was fully in anxiety in the first couple of days, and they helped me settle down a lot.
    • Also, the nurses’ skills to implement every single task assigned were truly remarkable. First, every one was equipped with the fundamental skills to conduct treatment like using a drip. Second, they communicated well with doctors so they understand the treatment they’re giving to a patient. Last but not least, they communicated friendly with the patient so the treatment went as smoothly as possible.
    • These things might not seem surprising to the nurses, but as someone in the IT field, achieving this level of skills as the standard felt unbelievable.
  • I couldn’t attend my last university lecture due to hospitalization.
• Knitting is fun.
  • When I was anxious, knitting and using my fingers really helped divert my attention from stress factors.
• Reading is fun.

Book List

The most memorable lesson was from “Intelligent Writing and Presentation”: “Understand to the marrow of the bone.” For engineers to produce good work, they first need to understand deeply what they are working on. Examples of this include the design of the codebase, the business value of the project, the dataset under analysis, and the languages or frameworks being used. When trying to improve the quality of their output, people often focus on refining methodologies, but without a sufficient understanding of the work itself, even polished methods will only yield limited results. While reading this book, I reflected a lot on my thesis and my past work with some regret.

I wrote a review of DIE WITH ZERO: Gen Z read the book DIE WITH ZERO: Key takeaways from our perspectives

In Tech books, I read “Peering War Chronicles”, “Kotlin in Action”, and “The UNIX Philosophy.” The “Peering War Chronicles” is unrelated to my field, so I’m reading it for fun, feeling like I’m reading real war chronicles before bed. For “Kotlin in Action,” I’m not reading it cover to cover but selecting topics I want to study from the table of contents. I gained a good understanding of Kotlin’s concurrency. The propagation of coroutine cancellations through Structured Concurrency seems highly useful for preventing unintended coroutine leftovers.

In February, I plan to continue studying Kotlin while also gaining some practical experience with AWS and Kubernetes.