My Grinding Strategy

Target: >$30K/year salary

Field: Software Engineering, AI, Low-level

Countries: Any 1st world countries (english speaking)

Expected timeline: 2 years

Goals to be met:

  • English proficiency. Acceptance criteria: IELTS Band 7.5 and excel in mock interview. Able to elaborate thoughts and have constructed arguments into a clear articulation.
  • Software engineering knowledge. Acceptance criteria: understand, memorize, and able to explain the software engineering practices and system design in proficient english.
  • Leetcode. Acceptance criteria: at least 150-200 problems mixed topics and difficulties. Able to produce good solution in mind at a short glance to the problem. Able to elaborate my solutions in english.
  • AI Engineering. Acceptance criteria: able to build services that handle an AI model efficiently. Able to deploy and scale AI services in production. Able to use, train, and fine-tune AI models based on dataset given.
  • Low-level knowledge. Acceptance criteria: utilize C++ or Rust to significantly improve performance in the workflow. Able to utilize GPU for performance enhancement.
  • Open source. Acceptance criteria: build a hand-made open-source project related to AI and low-level.

Strategies:

  • Involve English in any kind of learning. It could be making the writeups for the solutions I make, or elaborate what I do or what I learned.
  • Question everything. Add what ifs to theories I just read.
  • Leetcode in the morning, 1 solution minimum. Self explain about the solution.
  • Exploring, reading, experiment, and coding at night. It could be open source or just trying something new.
  • In the weekends, at the very least, read and absorb something new.
  • In the weekends, do a weekly review of what I grind in the week. Am I getting closer to my goals? If not, then I was doing something wrong.
  • Get enough sleep. 10.30 PM max. Getting enough sleep is important to be able to think clearly in the morning. Good for our memory too.
  • Workout and exercise. This improves my cognitive function and overall wellness.
  • Remove distractions while focusing.