Initial goals in Poland

I’m feeling better compared to earlier this month. A lot has happened:

• I’ve been (gradually) figuring out how the heck my classes are working
• The other Poland ETAs and I went to Cluj-Napoca in Romania for a conference and allied with the ETAs from Armenia
• I took a flight to Valencia, saw an arm, and picked up some left-behind baggage
• I’ve beaten 6 or so campaigns in AoE2 and got too freaked out to play Inscryption further than I have so far

Suggested music: Yorushika - Hitchcock

 

Fulbright says that isolation and crummy weather are what most ETAs struggle with early into the grant, but games help keep me mentally occupied, and Polish weather is only a little rainier than Michigan’s. Still, it was an enormous morale boost to see people in Cluj. I think said morale boost, in combination with some honest words from a friend back home, has pushed me to sit down and figure out what the heck I’m doing here for the next eight months. (One month down already? Jeez we’re going fast.) I’m posting this soon after a series of layoffs from Bungie, where I interned the year before, so there’s some pressure behind this. But I’m going to stay cool-headed and be driven by what I want to do rather than being afraid of not doing enough.

I’m making informal groups by priority and also providing time estimates.

High priority

• Set up the blog. As I’m writing this, I am still figuring out how the heck to add comments (my Staticman instance on Heroku¹ is giving me a 500 error code, which is the error code that tells you that you probably can’t just google for a magical SO answer to fix your problem). With me being behind on that, I have of course not added styling or any personal character either. I’m hoping this blog will be how I communicate with my friends here and back home – plus a way to communicate deeper, more thought-out things than what I can express in a message over WhatsApp or Discord.
  Time estimate: First two weeks of November
  Task format: on/off, primary
• Write up the backlog of posts that are due from my pre-grant solo travel through Europe. It’s overdue that I report back to my friends back home, and moreover I’d like to think it’ll be helpful for the other ETAs if they decide to vacation out of the country while they’re here.
  Time estimate: November until Thanksgiving
  Task format: on/off, background
• Keep up the writing! If I can’t discipline myself to make time now, there’ll be no way I can do it during a 40+ hour / week job in the States, and I’ve debated with myself enough to decide that expressing these things is worth the time to me.
  Time estimate: all until June
  Task format: continuous, background
• Explore drawing – simple webcomic-y stuff. My university has been generous enough to provide me a drawing pad. Based on my doodles from Romania, I think I can make some meaningful creative work, unless you’re one specific Poland ETA whose portrait I made look like a dead millipede on a square :) But I do have some ideas, and I’m making this higher priority because I think I’ll regret it if I waste the opportunity entirely.
  Time estimate: all until June
  Task format: continuous, background
• Learn Polish history from 1918 onward. In short, Polish history and Chinese history from the 1920s-1990s have a lot of parallels, and I want to explore how Poles endured those times and compare to how my family endured theirs. It’s going to be less of a thesis / scholarly document and more personal journey / memoir-ish work. I’m not sure how far I’ll be taking this, so I’ll plan on making an individual post later with more details.
  Time estimate: 5 months between November and March
  Task format: on/off, primary

Medium priority

• Keep up my coding chops with open-source contributions, with a plan to work on the Godot open-source video game engine in particular. I am teaching computer science already, so I think I will be okay if I don’t work on any open source projects? But I do legitimately like coding, and there’s more attention being directed towards Godot after the Unity fiasco in September. I think the things I’m doing in the high-priority segment are more important to me while I’m here in Poland, so I’m keeping this in the medium priority section even if that might slow my career progression a little bit.
  Time estimate: all until June, focus more December onward
  Task format: continuous, background
• Explore music. I had a tune written in my head while on the trip…it comes back every now and then and I would like to write it down. Not sure if composition is what I’ll keep doing, but I do plan on getting a guitar and relearning how to play some songs – I think the other ETAs might appreciate a tune or two to make home feel a little closer.
  Time estimate: all until June, focus in December
  Task format: continuous, background
• Integrate with the Polish – that means learning language, customs, and going out and engaging myself with Poles. I don’t need to do this fully and I will not prioritize doing it fully; however, I think the Polish have a strong national culture, and it would be crude and disrespectful of me to single-mindedly pursue my “high priority” goals without bothering to interact with the people around me.
  Time estimate: all until June
  Task format: continuous, background
• Do some swimming so that my arms don’t turn into sticks (if you’ve seen me in shorts you know my legs are fine)
  Time estimate: all until June
  Task format: continuous, background

Low priority

• Make a video game. This is something I was juggling in my head after seeing some game dev folks through Europe during my travels; however, I don’t think any game I make here would better or particularly distinct from a game I might make when I leave Poland. It’s just a matter of how I use the extra time I get from having a 20-hour job, and I think it’s more important for me to develop creative and social skills that will help me in the future if I decide to pursue some sort of solo dev endeavor. That said, I think I should at least be making some sort of sandbox demos in Godot if I am planning on contributing, and making a proper polished (very small) game for the first time I think would give me the confidence for indie in the future. So it’s not a non-goal.
  Time estimate: January-March
  Task format: continuous, primary
• Grind Leetcode for job application prep. It’s like SAT prep for coding jobs, you just have to do the prep or people won’t take you. It would be stupid to come here on a cultural exchange program and then sit in my room doing practice problems, so I’m just planning on going through the Blind 75 (probably plus a few more) slowly over the course of a few months before I start apps. Time estimate: January-March
  Task format: continuous, background

Not all of these goals are equally thought out. Some of them I think need to be broken down more after I take the time to explore.

These goals will evolve and goalposts will move as I work on everything. Some will for sure be abandonded - something I read recently that has stuck with me is that the list of goals you are not working towards should be much, much longer than the list of goals that you are. It’s a matter of seeing what goals I am willing to move from this list to that other list.

Adding Staticman comments has taken a lot longer than I thought it would, and there’s no guarantee that my estimates for my other goals make sense either. So I may very well have to abandon something. I’m sure I’ll be frustrated at points. But I intend to make my time here useful – for me, for my students, for my Polish hosts…so there’s not much to do except get started.

But maybe just a little more video games. :)

1. In actuality based on the error messages I think it’s actually something to do with the GitHub App the Heroku instance is hooked up to. I haven’t digged deep enough to tell, and honestly I’m not really looking forward to it…I just want comments man X_X ↩