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The Drizzle - ep 02 - Reflection and looking forward

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The Drizzle: ep 02 - 25k days left, experiments and learning from them, and brand building

🗓️ Short Forecast

A heavy down pour of life, learning, experimenting, and looking ahead. The last few week's I've spent reflecting, finding gratitude, and trying to forecast the bets I'm going to be making in the next year.

This week's project:

💦 Previous 21-day Forecast

  • 20-25k days left to live: First off, this isn't an existential post that I want to remember or others to remember as anything special. I have a privileged life, but I did just have a birthday and that's why I found this post by Yew Jim about having 10k days left so interesting, and timely. He says, "Time is only real currency", and I couldn't agree more. I'm in my mid 30s and to realize that at best I have 25k days left (to reach 100 yrs old), or 20k to reach 90 yrs old, this isn't a crisis, but it's a fact in the game of life. Sahil Bloom talks about something similar that I reflect on frequently as well (tagged below). Life's got a timeline to it, it's all finite, and there are patterns we adhere to, or try to, like the classic; college, car/house, kids, grandkids, or for me; college, kid, car, house, kid, tbd. Life can be crazy but looking at a number like 25k does humble me to focus on what's important. So with this birthday, I blow out my candles and wish for: more time, more energy, more focus.
  • More Spec-Driven Dev w/ Kiro: This last couple week's I burned through my free trial of Kiro AI's spec driven IDE. It was suggested by Ian Sherwood and I have to say, I'm pretty impressed by it. I've now tried GitHub's Specify project with Cursor, Windsurf, and Kiro, all basically clones of VSCode. Cursor is still top dog because it has the best free option, but Kiro impressed me with it's spec-driven method of helping it's AI agent plan, build tasks, and build sequencially. It's got a lot of the major features that Cursor and Windsurf have, great autocomplete, agent development w/ approved/denied cmds, but it has two different agent modes that make it different. Kiro has "vibe" mode and "spec" mode. Vibe mode is the one most are used to, give you agent instruction and let it run as fast as you allow it, and spec mode being more prescriptive that builds your /.kiro dir and under it three spec files (design.md, requirements.md, tasks.md). Similiar to Agent.md that can be used by most AI agents, but Kiro uses them as your manifest. I've learned when I have complex use case logic or I don't have know enough about how I want to build something, this method takes out the guess work/research. When I have a script I need to write, vibe coding tends to be the easiest path now but most likely to hallucinate so I spend just a little more time on design before I throw it a task.
  • Personal and Profession Branding: This is a topic that near and dear to my heart. While I think that where am I now has to do with a little luck, great leaders/sponsors/teams along the way, I've also spent a lot of time branding myself. At a big company like Disney, relationships are key. As part of building relationships, I've met with someone brand new every 2 weeks. I've have hundreds of 1:1s and found ways to be good at conversation, connecting dots, and building connections through interest in others. I've also been lucky to have 7 different jobs over 9 years, and I've had a great experience kind of being slotted into those jobs without much interviewing, but external interviews have been really difficult. Summarizing 9 years of multiple jobs has made me take a different approach to interviews over the last couple years. I'm going to note a few things that I've done that have helped me own my story and make it cohesive.
    • Career walking deck/site: Full credit has to go to Karen Ngo on this one. I saw her on LinkedIn discussing this and after trying it out, I'm a big fan of pulling up this resource to help tell my story in brief and most importantly, it makes you stand out in meetings with others. I used to have this in a single slide deck but I used this previous week's project opportunity to build it into a single page site using the Astro frontend framework - check it out here.
    • Story Development: This is something I started doing based on feedback during mock interviews. The feedback I received was that my experience between jobs blurred, it was hard for them to track, and I needed a better way of differentiating my impact in each position. Because LinkedIn is a big method for branding yourself and the only place outside of your resume where you have each and every position you've had listed, I chose to use this as my vehicle and my way of studying for interviews too. For each position I wrote a <2000 character summary; adding highlights of what I loved, what I learned, and the impact I made. Since instituting this, I've had more and more traffic on LinkedIn and more outreach from recruiters.
Career Walking Site

Check out the live demo env here.

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Making Bets

Sometimes I picture life and work as a gambling table. Fold too often, and you're out of money without taking any risks, or you call your blinds and you put chips on the table with the goal you could double.

Because we're approaching a new year and I want to spend my last 25k days on this earth doing the right stuff, I'm going to make these bets in the next year.

  • Running my first full marathon will help me improve my quality of life and prove that I can push myself to complete the feat.
  • Complete a Stanford Online Masters certification to show myself that I can balance extending my education with 2 kids and a busy life.
  • Get the confidence to do live recorded demos of my Sunday projects so I can build more trust within myself and my skills.
  • Build my deck and sauna in my backyard because there's nothing better than working with your hands and feeling accomplished by building real things.

How are you going to treat your next days?

I check this out and I've read Sahil's NY Times Bestseller, The 5 Types of Wealth, and seeing this graph always grounds me in what's important. Poeople - period.

🖇️ Digital Drizzle: Interesting Links/Stories

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