To new beginnings!

just booping around

🐈‍⬛ Life

Hi friend! How’s it going?

I ended up staying up half the night to finish watching this anime called A place further than the universe. It’s about high school girls who travel to Antarctica….but it’s seriously amazing. You know one of those rare animes/movies/books that gives you that empty, but happy and inspired feeling afterwards? Except it’s 3 am lol…

I’m also reading The Millionaire Fastlane. It talks about 3 different lanes that people walk in life: The Sidewalk, the Slowlane, and the Fastlane.

🚧 Sidewalk

People on the Sidewalk are like YOLO (I’m paraphrasing here).

🚶 Slowlane

People on the Slowlane are the ones that work a traditional job, climb the corporate ladder, diligently save a portion of each paycheck for investments like property and index funds, and over time you will have big enough of a nest egg to enjoy a rich retirement when you’re 65.

🏃 Fastlane

People on the Fastlane build “money trees” that generate income exponentially. One of the biggest differences between the Slowlane and the Fastlane is the decoupling of money and time. Note: it’s fast (like 10 years instead of 40) but NOT easy.

IMO people on the Slowlane and Fastlane are not mutually exclusive, especially when you’re just starting out! Really good book - highly recommend :)

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🌻 Learning & Productivity

This is going to sound quite ridiculous but a couple of weeks back, I bought this lockbox with a timer. You can put stuff in it and you can’t access it for however long it is that you initially set. It’s worked so well. I usually put junk food, sweets, and my phone in it. It’s pretty interesting because I immediately noticed that I no longer have to depend on my willpower and motivation. I think this is a great example of what James Clear says in his book Atomic Habits:

Motivation is Overvalued. Environment Often Matters More.

Here’s his post where he goes into more details about the importance of environment design - a really insightful read.

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👨‍💻 Coding

I’ve been working on a blockchain course and this week I implemented a block and simplified logic that chains them together. I also worked with my friend to finally settle on the blockchain project that we’re going to be working on. Remember how I always say that the best way to learn things is by doing a project? This is the project to help me learn the technology faster!

As an aside, I think it’s such a pity that there’s this stigma associated with blockchain, web3, crypto, and NFTs - although I totally get it. Why do scammy people always have to ruin things? I think the underlying blockchain technology is absolutely revolutionary and am personally super excited to see it mature (and hopefully get used in less scammy ways).

Also a reminder to everyone that’s at the beginning of their coding journey: don’t stress the details - learn to trust that you’ll figure it out. It’s worth it :)

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💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)

You are given a table of product launches by company by year. Write a query to count the net difference between the number of products companies launched in 2020 for the first time with the number of products companies launched in the previous year. Output the name of the companies and a net difference of net products released for 2020 compared to the previous year. If a company is new or had no products in 2019, then any product released in 2020 would be considered as new.

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 ❤️

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PS: Reply to this email about what you’d like to see in future editions of Boop’s Keyboard! It’s my first time writing a newsletter and I know there’s a lot for me to learn. Constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)

-Tina