When they used to ration food ft. 雪衣豆沙

🐈‍⬛ Life

Hi friend! How’s the week going for you? I’m so late on this newsletter…I’m sorry. 🥺

I was in my mom’s hometown the last few days and traveling around. We visited where she used to live and the places where she used to hang out. We also went to eat this dish called 雪衣豆沙. If you translate the name literally, it means snow-coated red bean paste. It’s red bean filling wrapped inside beaten egg white and then deep fried. You finish it off with a sprinkle of powdered sugar.

It’s kinda like a souffle? But red bean filling and fried.

So the story behind why this dish is so special is because back in the day when food was still rationed, this was apparently the best thing ever. My mom and her younger sister watched their older sister use up the entire month’s ration of oil and a week’s worth of eggs to make this for herself. My mom said that she and her younger sister just watched and the smell of the fried egg whites permeated the entire house and was so salient that she was never able to forget. Now, 40+ years later, she finally got to eat it!

a month’s worth of oil!

I must say it is quite good but also very oily because the egg whites absorbed all the oil. But to my mom…afterward, she was like “now my childhood dream is complete. I have lost motivation to keep trying in life.” ❤️😂

I’m back in Beijing now and catching up on lots of things. Btw I started posting on IG again! Check it out here!

🎥 Things I Watched

Didn’t really watch anything this week. 😲

📖 Books

I started re-reading the E-Myth Revisited because I wasn’t able to fully appreciate it the first time around. It’s a book about how to build a successful business.

Gerber starts off the book explaining that there are 3 people within each of us:

👩‍💻 The entrepreneur: the innovator, the grand strategist, the creator of new methods for penetrating or creating new markets.

👨‍💼 The manager: the pragmatic one who without him, there would be no planning, no order, and no predictability.

👨‍🔧 The technician: the doer. Without the technician, nothing would ever get done.

The entrepreneur lives in the future. The manager lives in the past. The technician lives in the present.

Small businesses fail when there is a lack of balance between the 3 roles. In particular, 80% of small businesses are technician-led and these are doomed to fail if they don’t evolve. On the other hand, a successful business is one that also has well developed entrepreneur and manager roles and is built differently from the very beginning. It’s a great book - highly recommend!

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🌻 Learning & Productivity

I wasn’t the most productive last week due to a lot of travelling. I felt a bit disorganized and there was some work that I didn’t have the time to get through because my schedule was so unpredictable. But I’m back in Beijing now. YAY!

Huge props to people who travel a lot and still manage to stay productive. Comment tips pls!! ✈️

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👨‍💻 What I’m Working On

More Lonely Octopus stuff! More acceptances just sent out! We’re now working on implementing specs and creating resources, including projects and study plans.

I genuinely care so much about Lonely Octopus and have a clear vision for the end product. From a personal level, I’m super excited, but definitely also with a touch of nervousness. I’ve done B2B with brand sponsorships, while Youtube is just dealt with by the platform. This is the first time I’m doing direct B2C.

heh sausage octopi

I feel a huge sense of responsibility. People trust me enough to spend money on a product that I’m building. The LO team trusts me and and the product enough to work with me. Well, that’s why we’re going to do everything we can to make the beta successful! 🐙🐙

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💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)

Maybe I should stream on twitch 🤔

List the top 10 users who accumulated the most sessions where they had more streaming sessions than viewing. Return the user_id, number of streaming sessions, and number of viewing sessions.

twitch_sessions

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: Thank you to everyone who comments and responds to the newsletters. I read every single one and REALLY appreciate them so much. Unfortunately, there’s not enough time in a day to answer everyone, but I just want to say that the stories y’all shared have helped me so much.

-Tina