The Pursuit of Wonder
🐈⬛ Life
Hi friend! How’s the week going for you?
Tbh I’m feeling a bit burned out and I’m glad that I’m going to be taking next week off. Going to LA for the week of July 4th!
(๑*ᗜ*) Anime
I’m still watching Space Brothers! It’s about this guy Mutta who got fired from his job because he headbutted his boss LOL.
Now he’s v sad especially because his brother achieved their dream of becoming an astronaut while he went the ‘safe’ route and now ended up unemployed. He can’t find another job, so he goes like welp and gives becoming an astronaut another shot and goes through the gruelling selection process.
The anime is pretty slow-paced but not because of fillers. It takes time to explore the backstories of characters and the situations they are in so you can really empathize with them. It’s really good - highly recommend!!
📖 Books
I finished reading Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong and also Atlas of the Heart.
Tbh Plays Well with Others kinda went over my head. Usually, there are a few salient things that I get from a book and I make notes of them. But for my notes on this book all I have is “success is from trusting people”. And the only takeaway I can remember is that I should make friends.
So idk if I was just in a particularly inattentive mood or…? But yeah, what are your thoughts about the book if you’ve read it? Should I go back and re-read it?
Atlas of the Heart is an interesting book. Brené Brown examines human emotions and groups them together based on why we experience certain emotions.
For example, there is this chapter titled Places We Go When It’s Beyond Us: Awe, Wonder, Confusion, Curiosity, Interest, Surprise. What stood out to me was the difference between awe and wonder. Awe makes us feel small and makes us feel connected to ourselves, the universe, and to each other. Wonder also makes us feel small, but it is expansive and drives our curiosity to learn more. Here’s the illustration:
This book is also narrated by the author in audiobook form and she does things like repeating herself for emphasis and giving descriptions of images, which is super helpful. If you’re into audiobooks, I highly recommend the audiobook version!
🌻 Learning & Productivity
This week was a rough week and as the weekend approaches, I reminded myself that pushing beyond my limit isn’t worth it. I used to have this sense of satisfaction from pushing beyond my limit. It felt like I was being self-disciplined and improving myself.
Now, I realize that real self-improvement is gradual and is about improving the baseline rather than reaching for one-offs here and there. Especially if it’s something like forcing myself to go to one more extra meeting. It’s so not worth it. 😌
👨💻 What I’m Learning
I’m still working on Lonely Octopus! I realize I haven’t actually explained what it is yet so let me do that!
Lonely Octopus is a program for people who want to self-study to achieve their goals. We all know that self-studying is notoriously difficult so Luke and I did initial research asking people what are the things that prevent them from consistently self-studying and achieving their goals. The answers we got focused on 3 factors:
🐙 It’s lonely studying by yourself, especially as an adult where nobody else around you is doing it too.
📚 It’s difficult to figure out what is the best individual study plan.
🚫 What if you try really hard and still fail?
So we started working on Lonely Octopus with this info + everything that we’ve learned from over a year of Study with Tina + what I’ve learned from my past failures lol.
This beta will focus specifically on people who want to transition into a data analytics or data science job. We want this to be group-based learning where people can have octopi friends working towards the same goal and not be lonely anymore. 🐙🐙 Haha does the name make more sense now?
We’ll help people develop their own study plans and will incorporate the scoreboard tracking system. We also want the program to be very merit-based as opposed to being able to pay for extra things. So if you’re consistent with studying then you get awarded with Octocoins (NOT SURE ABOUT THIS NAME SO PLS COMMENT SUGGESTIONS) which you can trade in for rewards like mock interviews, subscriptions like StrataScratch for interview prep, 1:1 mentorship, coffee chats with data scientists, data analysts, managers, recruiters etc.
Pls comment if there’s anything you would like to have in particular!! We’ll try our best to get it!
We’re starting with career transition to data roles just because it’s what Luke and I have the most experience in, but if things go well I would love to expand to lots of other subjects.
This is my first time actually explaining it in writing! How did I do? Does it make sense?
Also don’t blame Luke for this but I INSISTED that we go full-on octopus theme lmao. Like everything will be in multiples of 8 and have octopus-related names. Did you know that a group of octopi is called a consortium? 🤯
💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)
🍔 Active Google question - it has lots of different approaches!
A group of travellers embark on world tours starting with their home cities. Each traveller has an undecided itinerary that evolves over the course of the tour. Some travellers decide to abruptly end their journey mid-travel and live in their last destination. Given the dataset of dates on which they travelled between different pairs of cities, can you find out how many travellers ended up back in their home city? For simplicity, you can assume that each traveller made at most one trip between two cities in a day.
travel_history
Head on over here to answer the question!
*Btw if you’re prepping for data science interviews or just want to keep yourself sharp, Stratascratch is a great platform with 10k+ real interview questions on SQL and python coding, probability, product sense etc. You can use my code ‘tinahuang’ at checkout for 20% off ❤️
PS: Reply to this email about what you’d like to see in future editions of Boop’s Keyboard! I’m super new to writing a newsletter and I know there’s a lot for me to learn. ALL constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)
-Tina
Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading this one. Also cant wait to hear more about Lonely Octopus project!
Loved learning about lonely octopus. It's much needed! Just curious would entering the program be free of cost or is there a way we can avail it for free? Can't wait for you to launch the beta version :)