Planning and Preparation of What I'm Actually Gonna Be Doing

What's the Plan?

As have been said in one of my previous entry here, one of my biggest regret that I have during college is insufficient planning of my activities and what I want to accomplish. Reflecting from this, I will make sure that said regret does not occur anymore after my stay at UofT. This is even more crucial considering that, all things considered, my stay there is relatively short, only 4 months. Such a short duration could pass by all of a sudden without me noticing. I will prevent that from happening.

The main blueprint that I used in crafting my plan is of course my IISMA essay answer, specifically the answer for the second question. In it, there are three main body of activities that I have written down:

• Participating in hackathons.

• Participating in tech conferences.

• Volunteering at Free Geek Toronto.

That's all neat and good. But I also know that spending my 7th semester abroad incur an opportunity cost. One such cost is the progress of my final theses. Normally in ITB, the 7th semester is used by students to do the first half of their theses. Since I still would like to graduate on time, I will still have to spend my 7th semester abroad in Canada to do exactly that.

Little Tech Shop of Horrors

At the tail end of my middle school, I became familiar with the Linus Tech Tips (LTT) Youtube channel. It's a tech channel covering various PC hardwares and its peripherals. At that time, I watched one particular video from them. The video is basically a vlog of Linus spelunking to Free Geek Vancouver. Free Geek is a non-profit that handles the reuse of technology. They seek unwanted, unused, or unusable electronics, and then try to tinker with it to get it working again (or at least making it useful by cannibalizing it for another piece of electronics). The resulting working hardware can then be sold again at a substantial discount, making electronics more accessible to those who are underprivileged. The non-profit has several branches in certain major cities, the one that Linus visited was the Vancouver branch.

I think my middle school brain didn't quite grasp the noble part of the organization's mission (that'll come later). What he did grasp at the time however, is that the place was so damn cool. It's fascinating to see place where a bunch of hardware, old and new, are lying around freely to be tinkered and played with. This stuck with me until now. Of course as I grew older I realized that it was more than cool hardware, there were a significant element of socioeconomic problem trying to be resolved there: the problem of e-waste and the problem of inaccessibility of technology. Indeed, several months ago before my IISMA interview, I did the research on the state of e-waste in Indonesia just in case the interviewer asked me to justify why I want to volunteer at Free Geek Toronto, as mentioned in my essay answer. Though for better or for worse this didn't get asked during the interview.

So what I wanted to do is to be a part of that. Fortunately, Free Geek Toronto seems to be very accessible in regards to volunteering. All that I have to do is to join an online volunteer info session on September as the first step to be a volunteer there.

Hackathons

They say it's never late to start doing hackathons. Regardless, I think I could have got into hackathons sooner than when I'm already in my fourth year. The original plan that I had concocted from a while ago back in April was that I had to do my research on how to win a hackathon and participate in some hackathons myself before my departure. But, April and May is the peak of the academic load for my 6th semester, so that plan had to be tabled for a while. In late May, on the weekend in the middle of my finals, I sat down and listed all of the hackathons (and tech conferences) that are happening in Toronto and its proximity. Right after my finals concluded in early June, I got straight into my industrial internship, which is mandated by ITB as a precondition of graduation, in a small start-up called Covena. The internship takes quite a bit of toll on my time and energy and thus I wasn't really able to immediately find and look for hackathons in my proximity that I could participate in before my departure.

Fortunately, something happened in mid-June. Alisha, one of my friends, told me and my circle of friends that she's planning to join hackjakarta and that she's looking for teammate. Me and some of my other friends (Awe and Akbar) promptly took on the offer. This put into motion the original plan that I had.

GarudaHacks 5.0

I just told you that I'm going to hackjakarta with Alisha, so why is this section titled with a different hackathons? In one of the first meetings that me, Alisha, Awe, and Akbar had (which discussed our registration to hackjakarta), Alisha mentioned another hackathon called GarudaHacks. That hackathon took place from Thursday to Saturday, well within the weekdays. This made her, Awe, and Akbar, unable to join that hackathon because they have to work on the weekdays. However their internships aren't like mine. Because my internship is done remotely with relatively flexible hours and paid leave, I should be able to participate in GarudaHacks.

Now I need to find 3 teammates (the maximum number of people in a team for that hackathon is 4). I immediately hit up Dewo, a close friend of mine that is one year below me. He has worked together with me in the past at TEDxITB, from which I can confidently attest for his technical proficiency. He was immediately down for it, and then he contacted his other two friends: Nuel and Angie . Since the three of them is still a year away from their industrial internship, they are very much available for the upcoming hackathon.

Since the hackathon still took place over the weekdays (in which I am supposed to be working), I reached out to my boss asking for a two day leave for it. Fortunately it was a relatively slow week with no hard deadline on my tasks from any one of the Covena's client, meaning that I was permitted to take the leave. What was very interesting to see was the fact that both of my boss (CEO and CTO) have some history with GarudaHacks. My CEO was once offered to be a founding member of the hackathon and my CTO competed on the GarudaHacks 1.0 (5 years ago). Moreover, one of my coworkers is also a participant in this hackathon and has asked for the same two day leave as me.

A more detailed account of how that hackathon went and what the product that we developed was like can be seen in this page, which is dedicated to the GambleGone product that we developed during the course of the hackathon.

TL;DR I got the thrill of sprinting as fast as I could in 36 hours to create a working product, as well as the satisfaction that came from winning a hackathon (fourth place). The biggest lesson that I took away from the experience was that if you want to really win and get the best working product out, it is necessary to be unquestionable proficient in a piece of technology that you're planning to use to create said product. Additionally, it also taught me that, at least in the case of this particular hackathon, that implementation of a product or a feature does not matter as much, it's the idea behind said feature or product that counts.

hackjakarta

But back to hackjakarta. You can see the detail of how that went here. In essence, this time I got a taste of failure and the knowledge of why said failure occurs. Different hackathon has different preferences, different things that they're looking for. Even each of the distinct judges in the same hackathon could be valuing different things in a different way. This is something that I will always have to keep in mind when I'm going into a hackathon. I must do my research on what qualities exactly are they looking for out of a project.

The Hackathons in Ontario, Canada

As I said, I had done the research into the hackathons that will be happening around the area during my stay at UofT. I collected them in a Google Sheet along with any additional information that I might need about them. Unfortunately, there aren't that many of them. Some of the largest annual hackathon in the area took place during the summer or winter, which is outside of the duration of my stay. That said, I am still left with a decent amount of them given that I only have one semester:

• Hack Western

• NewHacks

• Hack the Valley

• Golden Hack

There is actually one more hackathon (it's actually the most prestigious one), Hack the North, that will take place in Waterloo. But because it's so large and quite close to my departure, I decided to not join as participant. Instead, I applied to be a volunteer. The logistics of having to go there and stay there over the weekend is for future Fatih to figure out but I'm sure it'll be okay.

Tech Conferences

Truth be told, I haven't found any good one. I think I'll just have to scour for events to attend right then and there once I am in Toronto.

Final Theses

When I was studying for my finals, I had to read my slides and all other materials. While doing so, I was also pondering about the materials I read and think about how they might be expanded into possible topic for my final theses. I was looking for a topic that is "so me" , meaning that it should be representative of me and my interest. Something I was particularly interested in at the time was a repudiation of clean code in favor of locality of behaviour. Once my finals has concluded, I immediately started on further exploration of some of the ideas that I came up with prior. A FigmaJam board and two draw.io files later, I was able to nail down one particular topic in code quality.

Several weeks prior, I asked a senior of mine what to do once you have a topic idea for your final theses, he said that I just needed to brought it forward to my lecturer that studies the field that contains my topic. So that is exactly what I did. The day before I had to go back to Tangsel after my finals, I went to one of my lecturer whose field revolves around, among other things, code quality. It turns out that she had actually been an advisor for two of my seniors who was also a part of the IISMA program in their 7th semester. She told me how this two seniors was able to do the bulk of the work for their final theses entirely during my stay. Once they went back to Indonesia, their final theses was mostly done, all that it needed to do was some finishing work.

I am not going to be as ambitious as them. At most, I would only work on my final theses while in Canada up until the chapter 3. But in doing that, I'll be sure to utilize UofT's vast array of literatures and collections for me to be able to go spelunking to see what's going on with the topic and what's the urgency of solving it.

Friends in Faraway Places

As you should have known by now, this is the first year that the University of Toronto becomes a part of the IISMA program, which means that we don't have any IISMA alumni, the first people that awardees would ask about questions about the university life there and the city that harbors the university. However, there is another group of people that can still be asked about those, the full-time Indonesian students that are already living and studying there, of which there are surprisingly many.

Sometime in May, we were contacted by one of the de facto leader (I think he would deny such claim being made of himself, but in our eyes this is true) of the BIM (Beasiswa Indonesia Maju) awardees who went to University of Toronto. His name is Imanuel, he's a third-year physics (this is a simplification of his degree, it's actually more complex than that) student studying in University of Toronto Mississauga, the campus that we will be studying at. Imanuel arranged for a handful of BIM awardees there to have a Zoom meeting with the four of us. The meeting will be them explaining the campus and the city, as well as answering any questions that we have about those two. The meeting went really well, we got a lot of insight about what to prepare before we come to the university. The four of us has the upmost gratitude for Imanuel and the gang for arranging this, since they really did the meeting out of their own goodwill without any obligations on their part. And we cannot wait to meet them and have a great deal of fun together once we arrive in Mississauga.