22 Jul Chicago, so far

So it's been half a year since I moved to Chicago. Things are going well I suppose. I've experienced the harsh winter of Chicago, but I've also seen the infamous beautiful sunsets of this city.  Overall, I guess there are two things that I wasn't exactly prepared for. First is taxes. Next is the isolation of living alone. Before moving here, I read that Chicago is a very affordable city when cost of living is factored in. That made me very hopeful! Over the past few months though, I've discovered that I haven't exactly been saving that much money. They say that you should think of your expenses as a function of your hourly pay. So it came as a surprise to me when it was a bit hard to justify eating out for one meal a few weeks back! Living in Chicago is not _that_ cheap. Living alone was also a very different experience. Being highly introverted by nature, I didn't think it'd be that bad. Besides working, I busied myself cooking, maintaining my apartment, playing the piano, exercising, working on projects, or just lounging around. It wasn't long before I realized I had quite a bit of free time on my hands, especially over long weekends. It's something that no amount of beautiful sunsets or brilliant thunderstorms or peaceful strolls on the riverwalk can cure. It's getting better now though, and I'm thankful for what I have :) At Google, I've just recently experienced my first-ever product launch. I've been working on the complete redesign of the [Transparency Report](https://transparencyreport.google.com/) for over half a year now, and it [officially launched](https://www.blog.google/topics/public-policy/new-look-our-transparency-report/) just 4 days ago. I've also learned a lot about how to write tests for my code. I used to think I knew at least a little bit about testing, but that's probably just a bit of the [Dunning-Kruger effect](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) coming into play. I learned to write tests for everything. I learned that if there was a bug, that meant the tests were not good enough. I learned to write code that was more testable, whether this means using dependency injection or just having less side effects overall. It's been a while since my last post here. I hope to write more often in the future. Thanks for sticking around!

Comments

Write a comment

Comment