TIWIL V

Welcome to TIWIL V

Life has been quite interesting the past couple of weeks and as we all know, with any interesting phase in life, you learn a lot! I had to jump through hoops, determine what is important in my life, start saying no regularly and more! So with all of this, this is what I learned…

New words

It technically isn’t a new word, but it’s something I never knew! I was notified in a pull request that I misspelled focusses and that the correct spelling should be focuses. To my disbelief I shifted my focus to the trusty Google and I was neither confirmed or denied of my suspicion. What might this mean you ask? Well both spellings are correct! As seen in this link, “focusses”, “focussing” and “focussed” are also used!

You might wonder why I titled this section ‘New words.’ :thinking_face: The title is due to the word foci. I have heard this word in the past, but it just struck me as if I was falling off a leaning chair. Subsequently will my foci be shifting from simply writing what I learned, to learning a new word each post as well!

Google’s not-so-famous apps

On the topic of foci; the person who pointed out my mistake sent me a link to proof the use of the word focuses is used more often compared to the lesser focusses. This proof was shown by comparing the usage of the two words and done via Google Books Ngram Viewer. Specifically, this link.

Just as with the word foci, I too have seen Ngram Viewer graphs before and knew of its existence but didn’t specifically know it was it. It’s a really nifty tool!

Ngram Viewer uses search terms provided by the user to display a graph showing how many times the search terms occurred in a corpus¹ of books. Reading its about page, I learned that this nifty tool has wildcard, inflection and case insensitive search. Along with those part-of-speech tags and ngram compositions can be utilizied by users.

This opens a world of possibilities! One such example is a summary of the most well known theorems by famous scientists:

It is fascinating to me that Google has all these side projects and smaller apps that some people would risk their lives for, because of their utter importance. It begs to ask the question, what else is there currently running that can be of great importance to me?

Burnout is a slow creeper

I am part of a small team currently, as in it’s M and I. Kieran decided to depart from the team and take on a challenge in another country. I am very excited for his part! Although, this has given rise to some new challenges in the team. These challenges were welcomed by M and I with an open heart and they still are. But the issue came in with M leaving for vacation for a few weeks.

I was excited to tackle this new environment of a lone-man-team. It started off as a normal day and for the first week nothing went wrong. The second week some of my secondary support (people not on my team, but with knowledge regarding my work) also took a few days off. Surprisingly, this was all fine too.

The actual difficulty came in the last week. There were a few unfortunate events that occurred which dropped a bigger load on my than expected. I thought I was handling all of this all too well, but by Wednesday I could feel a slow eery sensation. This feeling started to make me care a little bit less (although miniscule) about the quality of my work, how quick I respond to queries and where my focus lies.

All of this is said lightly as it really was only in the beginning stage. I realized it quickly, spoke to my manager and he gave some amazing words of encouragement.

I can’t this post on a negative note, so I just want to leave ya’ll with a short note.

I still LOVE my job! It’s engaging, challenging, satisfying, comforting, amazing, caring and many many more positive adjectives! It was just a rough patch and that’s fine. Rough patches are building blocks to a better future self.

1. Another new word! We’re doing great. Corpus means a collection of written texts, especially the entire works of a particular author or a body of writing on a particular subject. ↩