Mid-point check -in, Gratitude and Life Updates
Reading Time : 5 minutes
Day 16 /30.
I get a lot of questions in real life and on social media about how I am so chirpy and bubbly all the time. If you ask my husband, he will tell you what the truth is. 😋 It is so easy to believe everything on social media but what goes on behind the scenes maybe very different. So while you do end up seeing a lot of happy-me on there, I do have my sad phases too. But all jokes apart, I do think I try to maintain a very happy and positive mindset in general. It wasn’t easy, and took time, effort, practice and energy, but I think I am at a stage where I am happy with where I am. One of the key things that has helped me is practicing the art of being grateful. We take so many things for granted in our everyday lives but if we sit back and think, there is so much to be grateful for. You will be surprised how many people don’t have the mobile phones or desktops you are able to read this blog on - and this is just one of the many examples of things we take for granted. The importance of Gratitude needs a separate post in itself, but I just want to take the time to tell you how grateful I am for you reading this post today.
I can not believe I made it half-way through! 🎉 Pumping content every day is difficult - and this was just one post a day. I don’t know if I am not a very creative person or if it is something else, but thinking about what to post takes the life out of me! When I started this 30-day challenge, I just wanted SOMETHING to do. What I did not know, is that maybe I should have planned a few posts in advance of announcing the challenge 🤣 But then what is the fun in that - right? This website was a last-minute decision which I started and finished building in under 6 hours. I put out my first post on May 1, the very next day. So in the last 15 days, I haven’t really gone back and seen what changes I should make to the design of the website except a few suggestions from my friends (which I hope to implement - soon).
As I write this post, this website has 644 unique visitors and over 2500 page views - so I am thankful to each one of you for dropping by everyday and checking the content out. Not only that, thank you for leaving comments and sending me your questions - I am trying to build content that is most relevant to what you want to read. In that sense, I think it is not bad after-all to not have a stockpile of content because I can maneuver the pages based on demand. When I write the posts or include the videos in the technical blogs, I want to be as explanatory as possible. There are a 100 other blogs out there that can be very direct, very formal, and definitely have better content for various topics. My thought process is that I want my posts to be more organic and less scripted, such that I can explain things just as I understand them rather than in the most technical lingo. I believe that is one of the things that has helped me be where I am today - understanding and being able to explain what I understand.
When I started writing, I was also under the impression that my summer internship will be cancelled simply because it was supposed to be in New York. Over the last few days, I have found out that it will be fully-remote and I am immensely grateful for that. I have also found out what my project is, and while it is a very very cool project, there are a whole lot of things I know nothing about in that field so I need to start preparing. This means that over the next two weeks, you might also see content related to preparation for starting a (remote) internship. I am excited to work in a new team, learn new things, get back into a routine and start making 💵🤑 again. Conceptualising these posts and writing them takes up a couple of hours in my day and I am not sure yet that I want to give up on this challenge already (I am half-way done!! Still can’t believe it - I almost gave up twice ☺️). So tomorrow is Sunday - planning day - as you all know by now. I am going to make a new time table and hopefully stick to it the next 2 weeks. Here a few things I am doing these days that I need to fill up the time with :
Coursera specialization on Deep Learning in Medicine
Online course at school on Software Engineering
Spanish on Duolingo
Work as a creator on The Potpourri Project
Preparation for technical topics relevant to my summer internship
And of course, this website.
These are more academic (?!) things I am doing, while on the side I am trying to bake more and run in the evenings, whenever I can. I will probably put working out in the schedule but well, we’ll see how that goes. This week, on the bog however, you can expect me to talk about recursion in trees (I got a comment about that on one of my earlier posts), a leet-code question on the same topic as well as about the actual interview part of the whole interview-process. If there is anything else you would like to read about, or if you have any feedback for me, please leave it here. I read all comments as well as submissions from the Contact-Me form. :)
See you in a bit - in the meantime hope you’re keeping safe and healthy!
