Time is flowing really fast now. There are so many times I want to slow down and slack a bit, but there’s always this Business Management for Engineers assignment I have to take care with, and my boss is nudging me to do my work after spotting me stopped submitting codes, then there are family-times to be spent – all that left for me is nil.

So it goes something like ‘Wake up – College – Work/Assignment/Family – Sleep – Repeat’ for weekdays.

Honestly speaking, work is kind of tough for me, as a beginner. After a month staying in the company, I still can’t start my fire burning. It might due to the software I’m working with is difficult to deploy on my side, so I can’t really test out what I’m working with, as compared to other full-time engineers; then there’s complexity in the codebase, layers and layers of OO and abstraction which I’m not trained to juggle with, all without documentation – writing features would require me spend 20% of the time reading existing code, 70% of the time writing tests (yes, to me, tests are more difficult to write than the actual code) and only 10% of the time writing the actual code; then the team consists of seasoned engineers, all busy working on their part, less time to spend on “booting-up” a total noob, less time to document what should be done.

But honestly speaking, the issues I’m facing are no big deal if I totally dedicate my time exploring the code. My passion is somewhat missing, buried under all the starting-up-problems I’m facing. It’s like when you’re already experiencing failures on the moment you start – really lowers the morale a lot. To the extent I don’t even think I’m deserved to be paid.

I know I’m hire to code, not hired to whine. I know these are all trivial problems and I can solve them if I bring myself into it. But in my present situation, I can’t. The fire is just not there.

Ah, I’m lost in work.

Then there’s assignments. I’m supposed to take the role as a Technical Director in a mock company called CELTeC (Chong E Lam Tan Chen) consisting of 5 members. So I’m designing a product, which our team has agreed on. It should be a fairly simple telepresence robot – we call it Remote Observation Vehicle (ROV). The actual appearance of the product is not yet determined, I’ve drafted out a design with the shape of an egg, it’s actually inspired by Pyoro from Vandread.

Some of the members like the design, some don’t. I have a name for it though – it’s called TAMAROV (Tama, from Tamago 卵 in Japanese means ‘egg’; Tama can also derive from Tamashi 魂 in Japanese meaning ‘soul’) – and we thought of a company slogan, inspired by Lenovo - 新しい世界、新しい考え (Atarashii sekai, atarashii kangae – literally: new world, new thinking).

With the product design draft not finalized, the 3D model not produced, the technical documentation not done, the presentation not ready and 2 weeks left – everything is messed up.

Ah, I’m lost in assignments.

With so many things that needs my time, and my youth slipping away just like that – without having the chance to define myself, build my character. I really don’t plan to step into adulthood with the current state of my public relations and social networking skills.

Ah, I’m lost in life.

Ah, I’m lost in my pathway to the future, with my butt chased by CEO asking what tasks am I doing now.