Weekly Report #62 - Trip to Hong Kong, 5am Club Plan, and Rust Learning

Preface#

weekly_review_20240623

This article is a record and reflection of my life from 2024-06-17 to 2024-06-23.

I went to Hong Kong to attend the Google AI+Web3 event and met many colleagues from the team. I experienced staying overnight in an internet cafe because I couldn't find a hotel. I plan to adjust my daily routine based on the 5am Club concept. I also started learning Rust for the second time. There were many interesting things happening.

Trip to Hong Kong#

henry_and_kate_at_google

The most interesting thing this week was going to Hong Kong to attend Google's Web+AI event. Our project had some talks and roundtable forums there, and I also had the opportunity to visit Google's Hong Kong office (and got some souvenirs). After remote work, there are not many opportunities to meet colleagues face-to-face, but this time our team gathered in Hong Kong except for one colleague in the United States. We had meals together, played Texas Hold'em, and later took a walk in Shenzhen.

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Interestingly, my colleague Ares, who came with me from Hangzhou, didn't book a hotel in advance. We wandered around Times Square in Causeway Bay after midnight, and finally chose to stay overnight in an internet cafe. It was quite comfortable with the pillow I received from Google.

I suddenly remembered the experience of staying up late with my group members, buying a bunch of snacks and beer, chatting and watching the sunrise by Victoria Harbour after submitting a major assignment in Hong Kong. I also remembered when I went to Thailand with my friends, unlocking various landmarks on the map of Pokémon GO. When I traveled to Qingdao, I let the taxi driver drive around and take me to interesting places. These are all interesting life experiences.

Although I am a person who likes to plan most of the time, I also enjoy the randomness of life. Maybe many years later, I won't remember what interesting things were said in this Google talk, but I will definitely not forget the memory of staying overnight in the internet cafe.

5am Club Plan#

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Robin Sharma has a book called "The 5am Club," which proposes the concept of waking up at 5am to engage in self-improvement, learning, and exercise to achieve the optimal state. Although it may be easier for me, who often stays up until 3 or 4am, to sleep until 5am, I still have some yearning for this new way of life.

During college, I had a long period of extreme self-discipline. I slept at 1 or 2am and woke up at 6 or 7am. It seemed like I had endless energy and time. During my study in Hong Kong, I also woke up at around 6am to occupy seats in the library due to cross-disciplinary anxiety and academic pressure. I would return to my rental place close to 11pm, and this cycle repeated, but I enjoyed it.

However, perhaps because a significant portion of my time during work is naturally occupied, this habit seems to be quickly broken. In order to have more time for myself, I stay up later but also wake up later. There are periods when I maintain a good state, but it is also easy to fall into some bad cycles: poor studying state at night -> anxiety -> staying up late in retaliation -> waking up later the next day -> low efficiency during the day -> even worse studying state at night.

So I want to try and challenge myself starting from this week. It doesn't have to be exactly 5am, but relatively earlier. I will move my late-night study time to the morning and gradually adjust to the state of starting work at around 11am.

Due to being influenced by the study vlogs of "polebug" from the neighboring office, I also have the motivation to explore new fields. Therefore, I have set more interesting goals for myself. In the morning, I will start learning things that are not directly related to work but have always wanted to experience, such as SwiftUI, Rust, and developing AI applications using langchain. This time, I plan to learn by getting hands dirty and directly work on some side projects or contribute to open-source projects.

Learning Rust#

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Continuing from the previous section, I plan to learn Rust for the second time. The last time I learned it was in 2022. I actually studied it quite seriously for a while. I followed along and wrote some demo projects, and I also made study notes on GitHub ("pseudoyu/learn-rust"). However, there was no application scenario for it at work, so I have forgotten most of it.

There is a Rust enthusiast named Kally in our team. He recommended Rust throughout the Hong Kong and Shenzhen trip. He even made me watch an introductory video on YouTube before I boarded the plane. It was quite comfortable to watch.

But I plan to learn it again seriously and start writing my own projects. My current idea is to rewrite a Go project that synchronizes multiple platform information sources through RSSHub using Rust. I also want to see if there are any interesting open-source projects to contribute to.

Currently, I am watching the basic videos recommended by Kally on YouTube channels and the "Rust Programming First Lesson" from Geek Time that I bought a long time ago. Rust, here I come!

Telegram Channel 1000 subscribers#

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The channel has reached 1000 subscribers! I feel like I'm expressing myself less on Twitter or other platforms and prefer to share my thoughts in the channel.

Actually, the desire to share has always been there. Sometimes it's a conversation with myself, sometimes it's a late-night talk with people around me, and more often I want to share with more people and get some feedback. However, I have become less accustomed to sharing these things with people around me since I closed my Moments on social media. So for a long time, Twitter became my outlet. But in the past year, readers of my blog and followers of my channel have gradually become the audience for my sharing. It feels like a precious thing to listen to people, think, and respond under the current rhythm. I often remind myself not to forget this.

Thank you for listening to me.

Others#

Mac#

new_mbp_setup

I put the Google Cloud stickers I received on my MBP. It's like collecting stamps!

I found some strange things happening on my Mac during the week. When apps like Slack or Zoom opened the microphone, the cursor went out of control and clicked on the top left corner of the menu bar at a frequency of 2-3 seconds, as if it was being remotely controlled. Everything else was normal at other times. I went to Apple and the technical support guy to troubleshoot for a while and found that it was caused by iBar, a replacement for Bartender, which I installed recently. According to the comments, Barbee also has this issue, so you can refer to it 🫡.

The guy from Apple said that I could work there because of my proficiency in reproducing, troubleshooting, and operating 🤣 Apple users are really adaptable.

In addition, my other computer's screen was damaged by my other cat, Fanfan. So I decided to spend a lot of money to purchase Apple Care for my MBP14. It happened to be just over a year since I bought it on July 3rd. The Apple guy told me that I can extend it for another three years by purchasing it within a year. It feels like a good deal, as if I gained an extra year!

Hiring#

By the way, I want to share a job opening at my company: https://rss3.notion.site/52350e21c7e74a319807a4fcd6adf68e?v=3eb777c3d54f4a6888c405968cee9d69

We are currently hiring DevOps Engineers, AI Engineers, and Blockchain Engineers for remote work. The working atmosphere is great. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me. Looking forward to working with you in the future.

Interesting Things and Items#

Recommendations#

Although most interesting recommendations are automatically synchronized in the "Yu's Life" Telegram channel, I will list some of them here. It feels more like a newsletter.

Books#

Solaris: Similar to the setting of "The Three-Body Problem," Solaris revolves around a binary star. However, unlike the arrival or salvation in "The Three-Body Problem," Solaris may not care about Earth and its insignificant humans at all. It is just the self-centeredness of humans, who want to change it with their "noble" thoughts and values. It may even be hypocritical.
Normal People: I really like this British drama. I suddenly thought of this book while reading other books, so I plan to read the original work.
What My Bones Know: I read about half of it last year. These days, I thought about family and psychological healing, so I flipped through a few pages before going to bed.
Atlas Shrugged: A gift from a reader. I just started reading it.

pseudoyu