02 Apr 2025 #misc
All marketing goes to hearts and lungs.
Buy sunflower oil because it’s good for your heart.
Don’t smoke. And if you buy a pack of cigarettes and it comes with a picture of damaged lungs.
But what about kidneys? I haven’t seen any ads for them.
***
“She needs blood transfusions. Sign the consent here,” I was told.
My loved one was in the ICU. After lots of blood tests, a full-body scan, and urine exams, the diagnosis: chronic kidney disease.
Two days earlier, we took her to the ER.
Her abdomen was swollen. She couldn’t hold a simple conversation. She threw up constantly. Sometimes, she couldn’t even recognize us. Her body was poisoning itself.
Her kidneys had collapsed.
It was 2020, in the middle of the bat-soup crisis. We were scared of what she had and scared that she might get that deadly thing from the hospital air. Either one could kill her. Two invisible enemies.
She got the highest priority in triage at the ER. And she didn’t spend long time there before getting into the ICU. A couple of unknown heroes stood up for her with their blood.
An internist, a urologist, and a nephrologist saw her. She wasn’t fine at all.
***
Kidneys have two main functions:
- Remove excess liquid from your blood.
- Filter waste and toxins from your blood.
High blood pressure, diabetes, and kidney infections are signs that you should look for to start taking care of your kidneys more closely.
Drink enough water, exercise, stop smoking, and avoid salt. Take care of your kidneys.
Don’t trust me. Trust the US National Institute of Health. Or talk to your doctor.
***
“My life depends on a machine now,” she told me.
My loved one was shocked after her first session of dialysis.
When your kidneys are damaged, a machine replaces them. You’re “connected” to a machine that works like your kidneys. It takes out some blood, filters it out, and puts it back in. That happens for 3 or 4 hours, three times a week. That process is called “dialysis.”
It’s like going to a gym or exercising three times a week to stay healthy for a regular person. The only difference for her? She can’t skip a day or two. There’s more at risk for her than a slim body.
She first had a small tube in her neck, then in her chest. That’s how she got connected to that machine. And later, a vascular access on her arm (a vein and an artery are connected to get more blood out). This time, she got connected with two large needles. Ouuuch! That’s painful.
Sitting for 4 hours is uncomfortable.
But that’s not the worst part after a session of dialysis. High or low blood pressure, headaches, dizziness, and tiredness. That’s the worst part.
After every session, she eats and then goes right to bed. No more mental or physical energy for anything else. The day is over.
Does her life depend on a machine? Technically, yes. But we prefer to see it as the machine giving her life. It’s not her enemy, it’s her fighting partner.
01 Apr 2025 #writing
We can’t compete with AI on speed.
AI is getting faster, better, stronger, and cheaper. In seconds, it can produce a post about almost any topic in any writing style. An essay about climate change in the style of Hemingway? AI spits it out. Beep, beep, boop!
The battle against AI-generated content is lost.
Even if one day AI writes better and faster, I’ll still write because:
- Writing is learning: If you want to check if you understand a subject, try writing about it.
- Writing is teaching: You don’t need a lecture hall to teach or share anything. Simply write about it somewhere on the internet.
- Writing brings clear thinking: This reason is strong enough not to outsource our writing to AI.
- Writing is building a time capsule: Writing is leaving breadcrumbs of what we were learning and doing. It’s leaving success clues. It’s a time capsule.
- Writing is free, public therapy: In 2024, I applied to FAANG and failed. Instead of ranting that hiring is broken, I decided to write about it. It was liberating.
- Writing is an exercise for my creative mind: After ditching my to-do lists, writing is part of my daily routine to do something for my body, mind, and spirit each day.
And more importantly, writing helped me recover from burnout last year.
Last year, I took officially my first writing class.
It was the first step toward taking my writing seriously after about five years of blogging. Writing daily was part of welcoming a sense of joy into my life after all the dissatisfaction and disengagement of burning out.
In the end, writing rescued me.
Even if AI splits the world into writers and write-nots, even if it spits words faster than I ever could, I’ll continue writing, for my health, for my joy, for myself. I’d like to be a writer.
PS: This is my answer to Ron Markley’s Medium post titled: What if one day AI writes better than you? Will you still write?.
31 Mar 2025 #misc
For 8 years, calculators are banned in math class.
We can only use calculators after we learn to do arithmetic by hand, like multiplying and dividing 2- and 3-figure numbers manually. We have to learn the procedure first.
We should use AI the same way, only after we know how to do the procedure by hand.
If you aren’t comfortable with coding yet, don’t ask AI to generate code.
If you aren’t comfortable with writing, don’t ask AI to generate any text. Instead, use it to proofread and critique your writing.
AI should be like calculators in math: a tool to make us faster if we know what we’re doing. They can’t do the thinking part for us. That’s still on us.
30 Mar 2025 #csharp
Is it MM or mm for months when formatting dates? Is it yyyy-MM-dd or yyyy-mm-dd?
I always forgot which one to use…until I figured out an easy mnemonic.
MM vs mm
Ask yourself: Which one represents a larger time frame? Months or minutes?
Since one month is larger than one minute, it’s M for months. An uppercase m is larger than a lowercase m. Write, anyDate.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd").
mm vs fff
Then, what is it for milliseconds? Isn’t it mm?
Now, ask yourself: Which one is faster? One minute or one millisecond?
Since one millisecond is faster, write f instead of m. Write anyDate.ToString("hh:mm:ss.fff").
Easy, peasy now!
29 Mar 2025 #career #interview
If you’ve been around long enough in tech, you know hiring is broken.
We all have horror interview stories. It’s a shared experience all the way from small companies trying to imitate FAANG processes and large companies with dozens of “phases” to go through.
I’m not the exception, so here are two of my horror stories and a lesson.
They wanted to test my IQ
Before the bubble of 2020, a recruiter from a staffing company reached out on LinkedIn.
The meeting had an awkward start. The recruiter refused to speak in our native language, but in English. I might understand that, since they worked with American clients.
But the horrific part came when she told me they were going to test my IQ to see if I was “smart enough” to work with them. At that moment the interview ended for me. Run, Forrest, run!
They wanted a screen-recording
I’ve been asked to solve take-home interview challenges more than once.
But this time, with another staffing company, I had an unusual interview challenge: not only did I have to solve a medium-size coding exercise, but also record my screen while explaining out loud my thought process, in no more than 2 hours, and send them a link.
I guess a poor soul had to watch my recording at 2x, if anyone ever watched it. My thought was to create a YouTube channel and solve it live. At least, it would count towards the watch time to monetize a YouTube account. Of course, I didn’t continue.
Probably I had more horror stories I can’t remember.
The lesson
Hiring is a two-way street: you’re evaluating them the same way they’re evaluating you.
The first meeting shows how they’re going to treat you as an employee. And if you notice red flags during the process, like unclear expectations and unrealistic demands, imagine what it would be like working there.
Always ask about the next steps, salary, and compensation in the first meeting.
When I was job hunting, my rule was to step away if they didn’t share salary details in the first meeting. Why waste months only to discover they’re offering half of your current salary?