Hi there! I'm a little late on the upload this week as it was a busy weekend attending to a number of personal matters. One of the more exciting things that I was working on last week was a plugin for the Caldera Adversary Emulation Platform. I'm doing this as part of my final year project in NUS and I'm quite excited about it. I'll probably write a post about it in the future. Anyways, let's dive into this week's Nomz!

As an intern, I am blessed to have an incredible opportunity to push certain boundaries at work. As there are days where I have to be in school to focus on my project, I get to enjoy having legitimate excuses to not be in the office or to enter/leave the office whenever. And I believe this flexibility has had immense benefits on my mental state and my focus on my work in ByteDance. Whenever I'm doing work for the company, I'm able to deliver excellent work in an efficient manner. By ensuring that the features I make are bug free and work is kept to within working hours, I am able to focus entirely on either my school work or other personal commitments during non-working hours. Such a working lifestyle echoes the ideas shared in this article What A Truly Engaged Engineer Looks Like. Being late to the graduating party, I am truly blessed to have an opportunity to live out this working style and I will definitely want to try and repeat this in the future.

One of few recurring questions that pop up whenever I reflect on my journey in ByteDance would be "How can I make an impact now?", "What opportunities I have missed and how can I better recognise them in the future?". I will be saving the answers to these thoughts in another post. What I do want to share would be this article by Rahul Pandey on how he became an $800k Meta staff engineer. While the article focuses largely upon the monetary aspects of his income growth, I do want to highlight his grit during his early years in Meta as well as how he actively sought out doing work that was high impact.

Lastly, I've started reading The Ulysses Contract by Michael Kemp. I'm about 75% done with the book and I think it's a decent read so far. There are lots of places where he could have cut to the core tenets without the need for too much extraneous details. But this is his personal writing style and it is an interesting read nonetheless. I've also supplemented my reading with the podcast episodes from The Investors Podcast (the episodes are found under the We Study Billionaires podcast series on Spotify). Here's one episode that I greatly enjoyed listening to this week which covers great questions that newbies like me have.

That's all for this week's Nomz! There are plenty of features that I do want to implement into my personal website to make it more interactive and plenty of old content to re-organise and update to better share with you guys. Hopefully I'll be able to find some time amidst all the busyness of life. I look forward to sharing more with you guys next week!