The Purpose of This 'Blog'

I hesitate to call this a blog, and I don't really look at it as one. However, I can't think of a better name for my ultimate goal for this section of the website. Ultimately, I would like this blog to become a home for documenting my learning journey. I really enjoyed being a student and learning everyday, but I enjoyed sharing that learning with the people around me even more. That is one of the biggest things I've been missing since graduating college. This blog is here to hopefully begin to reconcile that.

As I continue to learn new things, I'm planning to use this site to share what I'm working on. I tend to be interested in a wide variety of topics, so I hope to reflect that on here as well. More than anything though, I hope I continue to improve in my programming capability through this website. I know it looks pretty ugly and bland now (the following paragraphs will hopefully help explain why), but watching it change is part of the joy! As I continue to learn new things, I'm planning to improve the site, and nothing would make me happier than not being able to recognize site a year from now due to it improving so much!

As alluded to above, I have largely neglected documenting my learning journey in the years since graduation. It seems reasonable to offer a quick summary to try to remediate that. If you are interested, that can be found below.

The Journey So Far

More Exposition...

Since graduating college, I've been trying to find a niche for myself in the work force. This has been met with several successes and several failures. However, one constant has remained since even high school, and that has been a love for learning. Personally, I tend to refer to myself as a curious generalist. This simply means for me that I get lost going down in a lot of rabbit holes, but I can never claim to be good at anything. During school, this was a huge asset. We looked a bit down a rabbit hole, but we moved on before I could get too lost or bored. Then at home, I would either dig deeper down a topic that hooked me in, or I would be on the hunt for my next rabbit hole. This home learning came largely from reading, educational YouTube (VSauce, Vertasium, CrashCourse, and SciShow were favorites at the time), and online resources like CourseEra, Codemy, and Khan Academy. Going through theses various resources (particularly YouTube) was a favorite (admittedly, rather nerdy) pastime of mine.

However, while in school, it seemed that the most important part of learning was the communication of the learning at the end. This crucial part of the learning journey is something that I have neglected since leaving college. In many ways, this begs the question of if I've learned anything since college, or if my learning has simply stagnated. While I truly feel I've grown and learned a lot since my formal education has ended, it feels incomplete without the communication. That addition of communication to the learning process is all this blog aims to be.

Quick College Background

College was a great time of learning and growth for me. I tried several different types of jobs, and that allowed me to get a good sense for what sort of things I like in a workplace. I got a degree in chemistry and did some computational research on a boron cluster. I also dealt blackjack and was president of my fraternity. The similarities between the kitchen and the lab were shown to me, and a love of both was formed. All-in-all, it was a great experience that I am incredibly grateful for. Most importantly though, I learned a ton.

Graduation and Beyond

I graduated in 2020. Right at the peak of COVID-19. This put me in a fairly interesting position. Up until graduation, I had been working as the lead cook at Braveheart's Pub (the local college bar). In fact, I was the only full-time cook. Although, the servers would often simply fill in as cooks when needed. This was normally a fairly easy position, and my responsibilities ended up extending to behind the bar, serving, and stocking as a result. However, we were rather light staffed before Covid hit. In addition, the owner had a baby right around graduation. To add to the chaos, we had started Doordash just a few months before Covid hit. All of these things compounded into creating a surprisingly busy time for the bar, specifically the kitchen.

Prior to Covid, I had become incredibly close with the Pub owner, and I didn't want to leave him high and dry. He had allowed me to practice making a website/landing page for his business and had been an amazing person to work for. (The repo for the site is still on my GitHub, but we decided to take it down once I left the business.) As a result, I stayed with him and the Pub until around November when I needed to make a move. Unfortunately, my student loans were going to start being due, and I couldn't keep working as a line cook.

As a side note, during Covid time, I had gotten back into programming. It had been a pretty big interest of mine back in high school, but it had taken a backseat in college. During college, I had treated programming more as a tool to get something done, rather than an actual hobby. This led to a considerable stagnation in my programming learning during this time, but it was brought back in full force during Covid. With the stimulus checks, my YouTube had filled with building PC videos. Following a LinusTechTips Guide, I built a PC as an investment with a stimulus check. Following guides from Luke Smith, I installed Arch and have been running Linux since. This reignited my interest in programming, and I started playing around with some projects. Some can still be found on my GitHub.

Arizona

This led me out to Arizona. My grandparents live out there, and they had moved out there over a decade ago to work out at a mine. In addition, they lived out in the mountains. Without distractions, I was planning to spend all of my free time on practicing programming. There is a copper mine in a small town called Morenci that is owned by Freeport-McMoRan Inc, and it is the largest open pit copper mine in the US. I went out there hoping to work as a chemist or engineer for them. In order to get a foot in the door, I accepted a job as a Haul Truck Operator. This was a pretty fun job, and I got to drive a 250-ton haul truck which was kind of neat. The hours were incredibly rough, though. It was 12 hour days of driving a truck. With a 45 minute commute. In addition, the schedule would switch from days to nights 4 times every 28 days. This was not a great fit for me. By July, I had barely practiced programming, and I needed a change.

Muskegon

This brought me back home to Muskegon. I was able to utilize my chemistry degree by working at a chemical plant. This job was absolutely incredible for teaching me how to work with large amounts of hazardous chemicals and industrial equipment. I got forklift certified, and I was able to do light maintenance on our equipment as well as some lab work. This job taught me more than I could possibly imagine, and simply learning the industry occupied a large amount of my free time for the first few months of the job. I would bring SOPs home (with permission) and study them. I would try to learn some of the fundamental engineering concepts I missed out on that were now relevant. I would try to draw the mechanisms for the chemical process to better understand what we were doing on the chemical level. That was a ton of fun for me. Eventually, we even started a new pharmaceutical process, so I got to start all that learning over again. Overall, this was an incredible job. However, I still had to switch from days to nights. Plus, the 12 hour shifts made it difficult to get into a rhythm with programming.

In addition, while back home in Muskegon, I had the honor to pursue two other passions of mine: coaching and tennis. I had reunited with one of my favorite tennis coaches from back in highschool. He was the varsity coach of the Woman's Team of my alma mater, and he needed an assistant. I jumped on the offer! Throughout this season, I created this hierarchy of tennis fundamentals. It also has a landing page to download the pdf that way at onepercent.tennis. Refining this website is a future project I hope to work on soon. At the moment, it's just a series of YouTube Playlists roughly organized in terms of general to specific. Overall, it was a ton of fun to reunite with the sport I love and my old coach!

Pfizer

Finally, this brings me to Pfizer. In June 2022, a recruiter from a contracting company reached out to me asking if I wanted to work on the Covid Vaccine Line at Pfizer. I ended up joining this contracting company for six months before getting hired in by Pfizer, where I have been since. A few months ago, I was able to restart my programming journey. While a contractor, I was working 12 days in a row with 2 days off. During this time, I was focusing on physical health rather than mental health.

Thankfully, I am now in a position where I can focus on both. So my learning journey with programming has continued stronger than ever. It restarted with me wanting to create a Player Ranking from the Sleeper API for a fantasy football league. This project is ongoing, but its horrible code is on GitHub. From there, I've come to realize I've missed a lot of fundamentals. So, I started to go through the amazing nand2tetris again. This is technically the second time I've done this, but the first time I only did the first part and feel like I missed a lot on that first run-through. I'm still not done with it. The project is on GitHub, and the README is up-to-date with its current state. I'm also trying to learn Odin-Lang and recently went through thePrimeAgen's algorithms course on FrontEndMasters. The plan is to convert those algorithms to Python and Odin-Lang. Lastly, this website is an ongoing project. Nginx is the web server and mail proxy server of choice. They are self hosted on Vultr using Debian as the OS. Feel free to email with any questions or feedback about it!

Thank you so much for reading!

Ike