I took a holiday to Norway with my partner in mid July. It was a much needed break from the desperate job search. After Datadog rejected me after the final round of interview, I maniacally applied to every single job that I could find. I was so desperate that I even applied to a job that I was not qualified for nor interested in.

I recieved some phone calls from Spanish speaking recuiters asking things that are already included in the applications. I tried to answer their questions as patiently as I could. They promised to get back to me but never did.

After two weeks in Norway, I came back to Finland feeling utterly distracted. Soon afterwards was our wedding ceremony, families and friends came to visit. It did not help with getting back to focused work mode.

My Spanish residence permit was about to expire, which had been the major stress for this summer. I did not manage to get it renewed since the prospective job interviews did not fruit into offers. I had to leave Finland and fly to Spain the day before the expiration date.

The past few days were the hottest days in Spain. It was so hot that my laptop could not function properly. Alone on my own in my 50 square meters flat, thoughts would not leave me alone.

What am I doing with my life here?

I will never be able to get a job as a developer.

Maybe I should go back to uni to study a CS degree.

No I need to make money.

Coming to Spain was a terrible mistake.

I am wasting my life.

I wrote with pen and paper, trying to get the thoughts out of my head. I wrote about my fears, my worries, my hopes and dreams. I wrote about my past, my present and my future. I wrote about my family, my friends and my new husband.

It worked. Whatever that was materialized on paper magically disappeared in my head.

Today was the first day under 40 degrees. My laptop could somewhat function with loud fanning noise. Sometimes it would get stuck and I would have to close it and wait for it to cool down.

But I felt better. There are still voices in my head, but not as debilitating as before. I still think how arbitary the whole job search thing is. I got lucky once, entred the interview process and recieved an offer. I felt confident about my skills and feel good about myself as a person. Now after nearly 100 applications and not a single interview, I start to doubt myself, and this whole endeavour.

Nonethless, I feel functional again and ready to try hard.

I have 100% success rate progressing to the final round of interview, and 50% offer rate. The problem is to pass the resume screening and meet with the recuiter.

To not solely rely on luck, I need to improve my resume. I need to have more projects to put on it.

So I spent a few hours today researching the options out there.

Here are some of the things I found:

• Frontend Mentor. They offer designs for frontend devs to implement. It lacks of instruction, and community engagement. I passed on this one.
• Rviewer coding challenge. It's a platform to connect devs and companies through coding challengs. The commnity is active, and the instructions are comprehensive. I will start with this one.
• Coding challenges from John Crickett. I just love the challenges themselves. Very practical and they tackle fundemental CS problems.

Meanwhile, I want to keep accumulate experience and work in technical writing. I am currently working on a project with Open Beta, a community for open source projects. I am writing documentation for their projects. Coding blog is another way to keep my writing skills sharp.

Now I am busy with tasks again.

This week I spent one hour per day to learn Finnish. Like anything, consistency is key. Ample evidence has shown that shorter duration but higher frequency produces better results than lower frequency and longer duration per session.

There are quite a lot of free Finnish online courses. The one I liked and studied with is the Introductory Finnish from Aalto University. I would say it's grammar focused, with staged but authentic feeling video materials. It came with sufficient exercies to test understanding. I completed the course in 4 and half hours over the course of one week.

What I learned​

• Basic Finnish grammar: personal cases, plural forms, partitive form, local cases, negative form.
• Vocubulary: common verbs(want, be, eat, drink, go, come etc), numbers, days of the week, months, colors, seasons, food, meals, places, etc.
• A bit of spoken Finnish(quite different from written Finnish that's taught in the main course)

My favorite Finnish phrase remains to be : Minä en hualua!! I picked it up from the neigbour's kid and used it with my partner all the time. Somehow very satisfying saying it in Finnish.

For the remaining hour, I searched for more free online Finnish courses and found this page with a collection of Finnish courses. I picked extreme Finnish to learn next for three reasons:

1. It teaches spoken Finnish. I'd like to start communicating in Finnish ASAP.
2. It uses video material and comes with exercies to check understanding.
3. It's structured.

I think rich form material like videos work the best for me in learning languages becuase it stimulates all sensors not just eyes. Language is a sound also.

I'll keep going with my one hour per day streak and see where I am when I finish Extreme Finnish.

Yesterday the recuiter from Datadog called me and delivered the rejection after I completed all the interview rounds.

She said the team choosed another candidate because that person has a more suitable tech stack.

I felt bumped but not surprised. It had been 10ish days since the final round of interview. Normally if they don't get back to you within a week, generally means they choosed someone elese.

The hiring season for new grads is pretty much over, and I am still jobless. I kept sending resumes when I saw suitable positons, but to be honest, there aren't many for juniors. Most applications did not get any response, not even a rejection email. They were eaten by the industry.

Yesterday I listened to an old podcast from freeCodeCamp about a high school English teacher's experience breaking into tech. That was four years ago and he described the job search as horrendous. In fact, he nearly gave up when he was rejected by a job he felt over qualified for.

But of course, he made it, otherwise he would've not been on the podcast. We love success stories, and hope to get motivated by it. It seems like most people went through a hard time finding their first job but eventualky they maneged to do it. I wonder how big of a role survivorship bias plays in this picture.

It was 99% luck. He went to a freecodecamp meetup, randomly talked a guy who happened to be the CEO of a company that happens to need a React developer.

And that's it. After hundreds and hundreds of applications being eaten by the industry, he got lucky, and the industry let him pass through.

My luck was in May when someone I have never met referred me to her company for a software engineer 1 position. I got an interview, did well in the interview, then it came the offer. However I did not get the job because I do not have work permit. That guy in the story did not have to worry about work permit because he is a Brit working in Austrilia. First world citizens don't ever have to worry about work permit in the first world. Everyone on the xiaohongshu who is trying to break into tech has to go through this first huge hurdle.

I did not. And it still hurts.

I should have known better before I decided to pay the Spanish university for a master's degree. They want your money but won't give you right to work here. It is tremendously diffcult to conver study permit to work permit in Spain(and in most EU countries so I have heard).

I should have married someone. That was the advice from Chinese who made it. It seems, the only way to access work right is by marriage, or pareja de hecho in Spain. That makes you one of them because you are one of their's family member.

This idea made me sick.

Living in a society where all the doors are closed, and trying to break into an industry that is savage, I sure have the challenge I wished for.

I want to remember this moment of down, feel the rock bottom and see what it makes of me.

Am I able to do something about it? Let's see.

Continue working on my coding blog.

Done​

• Added some customized styles.(yes purple!!)
• Added more categories to docs folder

To-Do​

• Migrate my posts to this site(write a script to do it?)

Backlog​

• Eventually,figure out how to rename /docs to /coding. Not in a rush though.

Daily Nuggets​

• Markdown front matter example

---
id: doc-markdown
title: Docs Markdown Features
hide_title: false
hide_table_of_contents: false
sidebar_label: Markdown
sidebar_position: 3
pagination_label: Markdown features
custom_edit_url: https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/edit/main/docs/api-doc-markdown.md
description: How do I find you when I cannot solve this problem
keywords:
  - docs
  - docusaurus
image: https://i.imgur.com/mErPwqL.png
slug: /myDoc
last_update:
  date: 1/1/2000
  author: custom author name
---

I love this letter: a reject to rejection letter​

小红书 post​

本来它是一个做 documentation 的工具，因为OpenBeta 用的就是这个，我前段时间更新项目文档，就觉得真好用。 最近对AI感兴趣，就想，如果能把我的个人数据都喂给AI，然后让它给我干活得多好啊。那前提是得产生数据啊！所以需要一个快速好用的brain dump 工具。 刚学码的时候用gh pages 建了个portfolio, 不好用，特别耽误时间，also need to install Ruby and a bunch other packages to run locally. 去年圣诞试了Next.js, 就一种杀鸡用砍牛刀（是这么说的吗）的感觉，99%的功能用不着。 昨天开始搞docusauras, 一个小时网站就上线了（我用gh pages host). 今天继续优化，基本可以看啦。

我最喜欢的是它给一个不难看的设计，我改改细节就好（比如颜色）。 我发现做portfolio 最难的是设计，我是dev 不是ui designer 啊老天。

小站 Responsive, super easy to customize, 而且支持React 啊啊啊啊啊！ 以后想加交互性强的功能也容易。 欢迎来gh 关注id: actuallyyun

I applied for MLH's fall fellowship, and it asked for my portfolio site.

I have one that's hosted on Github Pages, but it's been a while since I worked on it. I was trying to update it, but really struggled with Jkyll. To run the site locally, I had to install Ruby, a version manager for Ruby, a Bundler and some other things.

To be able to run the site locally while working on it is absolutely crucial for productivity's sake.

Then I remembered Docusarus from the documentation site of Open Beta. Recently I updated some of OB's documentation and had a really good time working with the code.

After some very quick digging, I realized that Docusarus is perfect for my use-case: it's node based, uses tools I am already familiar with and love using. It's lightweight(in comparision to Next.js) and can be deployed to Github Pages as well.

I spent about an hour or so playing with it, and successfully deployed it to GH pages and it's live!

Comparing to the other times when I tried to set up a blog, Docusarus is very easy to use and well-documented.

For this project, I try to follow an iterative approach. Meaning building an end to end product as soon as possible, then incrementally improve it.

Today what I did was:

• Step 1: deploy a live blog
• Step 2: add basic personalized styling
• Step 3: the very first post(this one!)