Today, I ride a motorcycle taxi (or in Bahasa Indonesia called Ojek) via a ride-hailing application, a service open by my employer (I still pay tho), Go-Jek. I ride it on my way to the office. Unlike usual, I am not feeling good about it. The Ojek driver wears a very dirty Go-Jek driver jacket, seems not washed since months ago, the motorcycle and the helmet are also dirty. Yes, I know what I can expect from a cheap ride-hailing service like this. However what I want to point out is that this situation contrasted with another driver I go with several days ago. While an average driver is usually not wearing a very clean and shiny green driver jacket, this one is always using a clean and shiny one every time I go with this driver, the motorcycle is not a new model, but it is well maintained and clean enough.

A few days ago is my birthday, it’s been a very enjoying week having my birthday and my friends support me. However, as living beings, we need to accept that we eventually die. At Friday, May 11, I got a news from a friend that my academic adviser and final project adviser when I was in college passed away. It is a very shocking news knows that my favorite professor in college passed away not so long after I graduated.

In this special post, I just want to reflect what I’ve done to my environment, friends, and family.

Today, before I take my second shower in the evening, I take time to cleaning up my toilet and bathroom, as an early-career professional and a single person living alone in capital city here in Jakarta, cleaning up toilet is not a big deal for me. You might think that I better spent my time for doing code or learn something new, but you might be don’t know that I love cleaning up the toilet, because every time I do it, I learn something new, also this time. I want to talk about the similarity between refactor code and cleaning up toilet.

Do you know hackathon? It is a kind of competition where you doing code all night long, typically, 24 hours+, and in this competition, the winner usually judges by their ingenuity of the idea, and fast execution. Like a typical startup, my employer, Midtrans, also arrange a hackathon each year and their employee to stay competitive, happy and learn new stuff. Let me talk about some lessons learned after I finish the hackathon.

I practicing code review even practicing anything-in-version-control-review since 1.5 years ago when I started to contribute to Open Learning Exchange as an intern. It was a very interesting idea. You know my selfish mind at that time think I already good enough and what I push should be good, but not the case, but good is not enough. You know perfection is a lot of little things done right. Remember, the point here is a lot. We need to do right thing starts with the smallest fraction of our work to achieve perfection. I may exaggerate a little bit, but by doing the right thing from the start, perfection is not a very big thing.

When I was in college there is a very difficult subject that every student struggle with. It is because it is hard for us to learn forward or learn next chapter every week because most of us after the session finished haven’t grasp the whole or most idea of the chapter. So, when I say I want to learn the subject at night my fellow ask “You learn forward or learn backward?”