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My answer to the Bloganuary January 3 post:

This is going to be a short one. Partly because it is easy to answer, and mostly because I am quite occupied today. 😂

I attended University of Malaya to study Computer Science, major in Software Engineering.

The university is the oldest university in Malaysia. It was (and maybe still is) considered as the most prestigious one in the country.

I stayed in the 8th Residential College / Kolej Kediaman Kinabalu for the whole three years. I was quite active and joined many activities at that time, and won a number of awards for my contributions and achievements.

It was one of the best times in my life. Filled with memories. Good ones and some not so good ones. Mostly good. 🙂

This post is a response to the Bloganuary January 2 post:

Spending time with my daughter is play time. Taking her to places, enjoying good food, walking with her in the park, singing made-up creative silly songs with her, reading books to her in book stores and bed time stories before she sleeps.

I like watching movies too. I have watched all the Christopher Nolan movies. Love all his mind-bending, mind-blowing storytelling. And also Makoto Shinkai. Parasite movie is great. I enjoy watching great movies, even if they are in foreign language.

Occasionally I play some computer games too. The most recent one is FTL: Faster Than Light which I got for free from Epic Games. Good strategy game.

Every Friday, my team has a social call session where we have some random social chat and a social game. Usually we play on Board Game Arena.

Recently I also introduced and played Tak with my team mates on https://playtak.com/. It’s a very good strategy board game, with a very interesting game history. Unfortunately it’s not as well known as many other board games. I tried to find a physical Tak board game in Malaysia, but I couldn’t find it. Hopefully that will change. And hopefully that change starts from me.

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So the above is more of a layman point of view.

Let’s get a bit more philosophical.

People say “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.

But what if work is play, and play is work?

What if the things that you are working on and bring you money are also the things that you are passionate about, and bring fun and joy to you, and bring meanings and purpose to your life?

I think Matt is a good example. He has dedicated more than 50% of his life working on WordPress and open source. And he is going to continue to do that until he can’t do it anymore. It is work and also play that brings joy and meaning.

In the grand scheme of things, I’m still seeking the ultimate meaning and purpose of my life. But I am lucky and fortunate enough that I discovered my passion at an early age during my school time, and that I am working on things that I enjoy doing and play to my strength.

I used to work / play on LeetCode (see my LeetCode profile). It’s part work because it helps me improve my programming skills and build my online profile. It’s also part play because I see it like a game and I enjoyed doing it (until I found out that sometimes even though my solutions passed the test, they are actually incorrect. This shall be a post for another day).

And same goes to the things I do in my daily life. I enjoy coding (while still learning PHP which is one of my biggest challenges), solving problems, creating things and contributing to open source, sharing my things with the world. Are they my work? Or are they my play?

I guess in the end, what I want to say here is:

Make the best playtime your worktime.

Make the best worktime your playtime.

It may not be achievable for everyone. But if you have achieved that, you may have found a good state in life.

This post is a response to the following Bloganuary January 1 prompt:

I have challenges in life. To keep things short and simple, I’ll just focus on challenges related to my work in Automattic right now.

The one biggest challenge for me in Automattic is PHP.

I joined Automattic in September 2020 as a Senior JavaScript Engineer. I like JavaScript, front-end development with React, and all the UI visual stuff. I did not have professional development experience with PHP in my career prior to that. (I should talk about my professional career and my thoughts and experience with PHP in separate posts.)

Throughout the past three years in Automattic, I have received feedbacks from my team leads and peers, that PHP is the biggest thing in my “room for improvement” department.

And, just like how I have been thinking to start this blog, I have also been thinking to challenge my own status quo, get out of my comfort zone, and work on leveling up my PHP skills.

The easiest one is probably learn by reviewing. For example, I reviewed the PHP code in PR Force marketing menu items order in our WooCommerce repo.

But reviewing and reading code isn’t the same as writing code. I should start writing and getting my hands dirty with PHP.

I did start with some small steps, writing PHP code by referring to some existing PHP code base with some minor changes. For example, I created PR Add Default Fallback Marketing Channel Recommendations recently, which is one of the projects I’m working on.

I’m hoping one day, my PHP skill would be good enough that I am comfortable to create an app or a WordPress plugin on my own, e.g. a to-do list plugin, inspired by TodoMVC.

I think that would be a pretty good milestone to celebrate.