2022년 7월 10일 일요일 – Mountain View 생활 39주차

Birth

Three weeks have left since my baby was born. Taking care of a baby is more challenging than we expected. I’ve already heard that a baby eats formula every two hours, but people didn’t tell me that a baby will not fall asleep after a meal.

While their bodies are growing up, babies suffer a feeling of pain that makes them cry. Parents call it the wonder weeks. It’s a crazy time for both parents and their babies. Whatever parents do for their babies, babies keep crying until they feel comfortable.

My mother-in-law came here and took my baby for three weeks. After she went back to Korea, the wonder weeks started. Hopefully, our baby is okay at night and often cries during the daytime.

The good thing is that time goes fast. It usually takes 20 mins to feed the formula. And we should wait 10 mins to an hour until my baby burps. Sometimes my baby doesn’t burp.

Now my baby has only US citizenship. We plan to register with the Korean government when we return to Korea.

AFAIK, going back to Korea takes at least a month. SSN arrives three weeks after birth. We can request a birth certificate 15-20 days after delivery. After getting these documents, we can request a US passport for our baby, which also takes several weeks.

So, people usually expect two months for the entire process.

Study

I’ve dropped CS 229 class. The course requires more prerequisite knowledge than I expected. However, I thought I had some background from other OCWs and could finish homework in three days. It was totally misleading, and I barely finished 1/4 of the assignment, spending two days.

It was also hard to concentrate on studying at home. Learning mathematics needs more concentration, but it was almost impossible. As I feel I should have spent a whole week even if I can concentrate.

I don’t know if I will try this course next year. ML is a specialized technology with a higher bar than general software engineering. ML engineers can be a general SWE but not vice versa.

Therefore, I was afraid of being at an unqualified level. But If I don’t enjoy the field and I need to spend a lot of effort. Focusing on my primary projects and learning current domain knowledge might be better.

If I felt easy and fast to learn ML, it would have been okay to proceed. But I just wasted the tuition for nothing. I’m not that smart to catch up with it very fast.

App

Developing an Android App is much more fun compared to the ML study. It doesn’t require much concentration, and I can write code in my little spare time.

The good aspect of doing a personal project is that there’s no blocker. I can make all product & technical decisions. As a result, my development speed is far faster than when I work on company projects. And It is good to practice what I’ve learned from the company.

However, it’s hard to expect growth in technical skills. There’s nobody to review my code and design. Since there’s no strict performance requirement or quality assurance, most solutions are referred from stack overflow, often outdated or inefficient.

As the project is going on, I realize that there are much more tasks to complete the project. The project usually takes 3-5 times more engineering work than I expected.

UX is also time-consuming. Since it’s tied to the product design, I should decide at least what to show and how the user experience will be. For now, there are valuable websites like Flaticon or Lottiefiles. However, even though I mimic others’ beautiful UX design, my outcome always looks clumsy and needs to be polished.

Anyway, my goal is to launch the app this year.

Economy

Global economic depression is not others’ problem. The news that some IT companies rescinded the offer is spreading on Linkedin. Several big tech companies, including Tesla, announced the layoff.

It would remind some people of the situation that happened in 2009. As I heard, many senior engineers were released to the job market and competed for the junior engineer position.

The government said that they should increase the interest rate due to inflation. But I’m curious which one is better between depression and inflation.

If the interest rate is increased and the inflation rate is decreased, the rich people with a lot of cash are beneficiaries. Due to the high interest, companies, and people who can’t afford the claim would be bankrupt. It would make the job market worse.

If the inflation rate is high, it will decrease the purchasing power. However, companies and people would feel less pressure on the debt. The problem is that it’s hard to manage the inflation rate, and inflation would make the bubble in the stock & real estate market bigger and more dangerous.

Obviously, people would cut down on expenses.

Flight

We decided not to visit Korea this year. The pediatrician said it is unsafe for infants younger than six months to take a flight. And my apartment rent agreement is over in September, and we might need to move to a cheaper and larger apartment. Therefore, we will visit Korea maybe next year.