inspired by Derek Sivers10/21/2024
I'm now a fourth-grade teacher in Shanghai, China. This is a significant career shift from software development that I'm glad to be embracing. At the end of 2023, I found myself on the job hunt unexpectedly. Though I wouldn't have chosen it, it also served as a period of reflection that I welcomed. During this time I explored many alternative career paths that we, (in our 20s), have the luxury to consider. A few months in I took an impromptu trip to East Asia to visit an old travel buddy who had just started working there. I spent the bulk of my days in Shanghai and also took several small excursions including Taipei, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Exploring these dynamic eastern cities was energizing and left me enthralled with the nostalgia of my first trip to China in 2019. I found that there is high demand here for English teachers, as the 2020 pandemic drove many Western expats out of the region. The friend I was visiting came here to fill a teaching position at a private school, and after meeting his employer I was excited to return home with job offers for both my wife and me.
The school year has begun, and I'm neck-deep in a new world. For the most part, my days look like any teacher's would. I get up early, walk the dog, and start my commute. I make coffee in the teachers' lounge before heading to my classroom to greet my co-teacher. My class prep consists mostly of file management and using the printer. Of course, there are also many distinctions since this is a bilingual school in China. Our primary school has eight class periods per day, three of which are taught in English by yours truly. The others are taught in Chinese, so each homeroom is equipped with one national and one foreign teacher. This is a great dynamic, as we split all the classroom duties outside of teaching like decorating, recess, and discipline. We also help each other circumvent the ever-present language barrier. Teaching has proven to be a fun job, though at the core it's administrative like any other. Many of my consistent todos have their parallels with the less sexy duties of corporate knowledge workers. The fun part is giving lessons, which is a calculated performance and a test of wits. Uncertainty is unavoidable, as student receptiveness varies across topics. Trying to get twenty kids to understand something new about a foreign language is an interesting game. There are good and bad days, and when a lesson doesn't go as planned, the need to change one's approach is undeniable. That's one example of the many instances as a teacher in which I'm glad for my background in software. Taking an agile approach to teaching has me treating each week like a sprint and each lesson like a user story. This analogy may earn some more thought in the future, as the agile methodology has proven to be the best way to work in many of my life's pursuits, which still holds up in teaching.
I haven't stopped programming since I stopped working as a programmer. My projects continue to grow in numbers, and I regularly update my personal website, which is a long-running project in itself. Recently, I've been optimizing the site's content management strategy. My blog has been available on my website for a while now, and all of that feature's data is stored in a database managed by WordPress. Used in this manner, WordPress acts as a headless CMS. A CMS is an application used for storing static content, and headless means the application doesn't come with a front end. It is only concerned with managing content, and the way that content is displayed is up to consumers. My website consumes the CMS via WordPress's built-in REST API, so when I write my posts in WordPress's text editor, they magically appear on my website too. I've started to move towards this approach for all text content on my site. Features like the home and about pages are primarily text, so they are better stored and easier to update in a CMS. One feature I haven't been able to integrate with the CMS is my resume page. I built a custom widget to display the contents of my resume, and that content wouldn't be nicely organized to fit into the widget if I just threw it all into a WordPress post. Adding resume-specific data tables to the WordPress database would make it much easier for consumers to use that data the way I intended, and for me to update my resume in the future. It's a good thing WordPress is open source, and their data models can be extended to achieve this. I can also build a plugin that will act as the CMS for the new data tables, enabling me to update my resume from a custom WordPress view that I get to design. I'm still at the drawing board on this project, and it's potentially a much larger undertaking than I anticipated, but it will be a great opportunity to learn how to develop a plugin and work with technologies I'm less familiar with like MySQL and PHP.
There's no denying that teaching fourth grade for a year will leave a gap in my technical resume. It's the kind of gap I'll be excited to explain someday, but I want to stay ahead of the curb and start building my defense early. Technical projects that I develop independently are part of this, and I've decided that certifications will supplement the professional dimension of my continued enrichment. Now that the only formal work I'm doing is as a freelancer, earning well-known certifications will show that I'm still serious about a career in software. I'm starting with AWS since it's the platform I've used the most, and I was able to pass the Certified Cloud Practitioner exam with relative ease. The second-handedness of getting certified to display my competence is troubling because ideally, my work would speak for itself without the need for credentials. And given the mixed opinions on some of these certs, I never gave them much thought while I was employed. But, the reality is my live projects do not require the scale or elasticity needed to justify premium cloud providers, so I've opted for budget infrastructure to reduce their expenses. Though I can speak to my experience with these platforms, tangible proof that you've used Azure, GCP, or AWS is always best, and I can secure that by sitting for a few tests. If nothing else, they ought to serve as helpful refreshers too. I plan to earn the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification in the next few weeks.
I haven't left behind the original reason I came to China during college. Though I'm not currently a student, I make a point of taking an interest in the language here. In America however, I fail masterfully at convincing myself to study foreign languages. I excelled in Spanish class for the first half of high school, but I dropped out my junior year at the first sign of difficulty. I couldn't justify enduring the subject. I draw a parallel from that experience to studying Chinese, which I was happy to engage in during my trip to Beijing, but found impossible to keep up upon my return. Embarrassingly, I have sunk scores of hours into a software project designed to help me study Mandarin in part, just to avoid the study itself. Luckily moving to Shanghai has made this study non-negotiable. I'm constantly learning new words and speaking tactics from my friends, neighbors, and colleagues. The opportunity to apply my training in my daily affairs is motivating enough to engage me. I hope to formalize my studies soon in order to increase my rate of progress. Foreign speaker Vitalik Buterin has entire blog posts that can be read in Chinese characters, and though I don't claim to possess genius approximating his, I think such a display of competence is achievable for many. Not to mention the exciting prospect of implementing internationalization on my website, following my journey to becoming bilingual.
My content diet continues to evolve with my interests. I've added a 40-minute commute to my daily routine, much of which is spent riding the subway. As is customary in Shanghai, I spend the entirety of the ride on my phone where I engage in reading Crime and Punishment, hearing news from The Yaron Brook Show, or self-studying Mandarin with ChinesePod. My wife and I also exercise in a gym a few days a week when I listen to any other podcast episodes I've marked or the audiobook of Atlas Shrugged. These sessions only include resistance training and stretching, as my cardio has been substantially offloaded to our daily walks, bike rides, and regular weekends dedicated to urban tourism. Occasionally I'll take the short jog or long walk down to the Huangpu River promenade we're lucky to live in such proximity to. Here we enjoy a unique southern view of Lujiazui from the Pudong side of the river, a formidable opponent to our sizable commute and any other obstacles associated with our new lodging.
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