tuesday by Joonho K. '20

8:00 AM
wake up. check my clock and go back to sleep.

9:00 AM
actually wake up. i take a shower, stop being naked, and am ready to head out the door by 9:45.

10:00 AM
arrive at work. my ‘commute’ is a foggy, yet warm fifteen minute walk. i tap my id at the elevator and take it to the sixth floor.

10:15 AM
standup.⁠01 against my better judgement, i've used a lot of software-engineering-specific terms in this blog post, which might provide insight to people interested in software engineering but will probably just be confusing to others. it doesn't help that most of my working day revolves around said specific terms. also, because software is such a large field, even software engineers will be confused by a lot of software specific terms. to be fair to both groups, i'll try and explain any software term that might need a definition in an annotation. standup is a short, daily team meeting where all team members briefly describe what they did yesterday / what they're going to do today / what's blocking them. i say, “yesterday, i fixed some errors in my PR⁠02 PR stands for pull request, a way to request changes to a codebase on github. to separate CKP logs by model and made a PR for sending shopperml ⁠03 the name of a project that my team works on. kubernetes⁠04 honestly, i can't describe kubernetes. even our dorm's resident kubernetes expert struggles to explain kubernetes in layman's terms. fully knowing that i am butchering what kubernetes actually does, i'll just say that it's an important part of deploying the shopperml project. pod logs to cloudwatch logs.⁠05 cloudwatch logs is an AWS service that can monitor logs. logs are important because they can track everything that happens in an application, which can be useful for things like debugging. today, i’m going to continue working on that.”
i realize how foreign that sounded even to me just two weeks ago. it was a mixture of software engineering vocabulary and company-specific terms i’ll forget soon after the internship is over.
we point a previously unpointed story in the current sprint⁠06 there's this thing called scrum, which is basically a method of getting work done. in scrum, work is done in (usually) 2-week periods called sprints, and within a sprint there are tasks called stories (synonymous with ticket, task, etc). stories are assigned points by the team as an indicator of how much time the story would take to complete. with leftover time, since standup is scheduled to be fifteen minutes long.

10:30 AM
i came in a bit late today, so i don’t start checking emails until now. i open up and organize my tabs in this order: slack, jira,⁠07 a software platform that pretty much implements the scrum methodology. github,⁠08 the most commonly used website for version control. everything else. i helps because i switch tabs using cmd+[123] a lot. nobody’s reviewed my PR yet.⁠09 in our team, in order for a PR to be accepted and merged into the main codebase, at least two team members need to approve it. :(

10:45 AM
i stop trying to figure out what kubernetes is for a moment to walk to the desk of alex y. ’20.⁠10 a fellow MIT intern!!! we took 6.UAT together in the spring and we were in the same recitation!!
“hey alex, do you wanna review my PR?”
“sure,” he replies. he reads it for a minute, then says, “i can’t find anything wrong with this PR.”
“nice.”
“i don’t approve PRs that i can’t find anything wrong with.”
“what!!”
“unless i’m requested for review on github.”
“…ok, be right back.”
“no!! don’t do it!!”
“too late.”

11:30 AM
usually lunch comes around this time, and tuesdays are good food and the lines are very long, so i head down to the second floor early. when i arrive, the food’s not there. saddened, i check slack on my phone to see the message, “Lunch is running late.”
i decide to play beat saber instead. yes, the office has VR, and yes, i play beat saber pretty much every day during lunch. it is amazing.

12:00 PM
lunch is make-your-own-burrito, except i make a bowl instead. i’m second in line, which turns out to be a good idea because five minutes later the lunch line is literally out the door.
it turns out to be better than chipotle.

1:00 PM
went out to look at the lake for a bit. lake washington is choppy today, and i don’t see the usual paddleboard or two out on the water. today is a bit cooler, and the air is crisp. eventually i head back to my desk and stare at AWS documentation. what is kubernetes?

3:00 PM
still not much luck with kubernetes. terms involving AWS and fluentd and Pods and DaemonSets and CloudWatch. i feel like i don’t even know what i don’t know. i munch on chocolate almonds. i get an alert from the ping-pong slack channel: they need a fourth player, so i lock my screen and head downstairs.

4:15 PM
after playing a few doubles games with the regular group of players, i’m back at my desk, ready to accept defeat. i feel like i have all the pieces i need to make this work, but i’m frustrated because i can’t put them together. i don’t have authorization to make an IAM role.⁠11 IAM is what AWS uses for managing permissions to do various actions within AWS. it's been frustrating because i have limited access to a lot of things, but at the same time it's understandable. i turn to my mentor, steven, who sits next to me, and tell him my problem. “honestly, i kind of want to just pass this task to someone else…”
“so actually, i think i’ve figured out a way to use the fluentd image without the IAM role stuff.”
“what!!”
“give me five minutes to collect everything i’ll need to explain to you how this task is actually doable.”
“ok…”
i glace at jira for a couple minutes before steven says, “alright” and gives a perfectly clear explanation. after a half hour of questions, i see the light. steven is a god.
i realize suddenly that the cold brew on tap that had been out of service for a month is back, and i pour myself a cup. for the first time in two weeks, i think i know how to do this task.

5:30 PM
after some finagling, i commit and push⁠12 more github lingo that means, 'made changes.' my new proposed method for sending kubernetes logs to cloudwatch. hopefully this time, it’ll actually work. do i dare say that kubernetes is actually kind of cool?
…nah, i can’t say that.
but for now, it’s time to go home.

6:00 PM
arrive at home. i suddenly feel kind of tired and flop onto my bed and kind of lay there for an hour, doing random things on my phone. this happens a lot more often than is mentioned. 13 i feel like we all have these moments where we decide to watch youtube videos at 10pm and then you look at the clock after a moment and it's 1am all of a sudden.

i try to add someone as a space reservation signatory for Toons on the ASA database.⁠14 ASA isn't a software term, it's the MIT Association of Student Activities. i can’t tell if i don’t have permissions to do that yet, or MIT Engage’s UI/UX is actually trash.

8:00 PM
i need to buy more razors and shampoo, and i’m also pretty hungry, and there’s no food at home. this naturally means i’m going to go out to get ramen, followed by safeway. did you know seattle has a santouka? well, technically it’s in bellevue, not seattle, but pretty much. (i reviewed boston’s two santouka locations in my ramen post.)
one shoyu ramen and safeway trip later, i take an uber back home.

10:00 PM
at this point, there’s usually a fixed number of things i do, but today it was finishing writing this blog. usually i’ll be playing a video game or watching jojo or grinding japanese or something like that. i’ve been meaning to try developing a personal project, but after work i usually don’t seem to find the motivation.

??:??
it’s a good idea to wake up for work tomorrow, so i guess it’s time to do that. but before i do, i need to wait for the load of laundry i threw in at 11pm. i open up a twitch stream to pass the time. the glow of the computer screen is the only thing that lights up the living room. the washing machine crackles and whirs, pausing occasionally before moving on to the next phase in the washing cycle.