Academia – Page 15 – The Renegade Coder

Hello again! Welcome to another issue of The Renegade Coder Update. Not much has happened this quiet week. In fact, I've had some free time. Let's talk about it. Overwatch Sometime last week, Overwatch launched into its 9th season of competitive play. As usual, I've placed in bottom Plat as I've been cursed to stay there for the last 5 seasons. I'm hoping this season I can finally escape. For those of you unfamiliar with the ranking system, here's the official list: Bronze (< 1500)Silver (1500 - 1999)Gold (2000 - 2499)Platinum (2500 - 2999)Diamond (3000 - 3499)Master (3500 - 3999)Grandmaster (4000 - 5000)Top 500 As you can see, Plat sits right in the middle of the bell curve. Do I think that I'm just average? Not really. Am I destined to stay there forever? Definitely. I find Plat to be so frustrating because the level of skill from player to player varies wildly, yet everyone seems to think they're pretty good. As a result, Plat is incredibly toxic and devoid of teamwork. The first team to form some sort of accidental combo wins. That's plat in a nutshell. I think I struggle because I choose not to use a mic. Instead, I tend to just follow the team hoping that my simple effort to work together will win us the game. Unfortunately, Plat is plagued with dps-duo-queues and screaming children, so winning is often out of my control. Hopefully, this season is my ticket out. I'm already sitting at 2700. :) Grad School Update As of last week, I have officially been accepted by two schools and rejected by three. For me, that's really exciting! Unfortunately, I'm still waiting on seven other schools to get back to me, but I'm already extremely happy with the places that have accepted me already. I'm more or less curious what my final count will be out of twelve. I assume since I've had to wait this long that the rest are rejections. That said, I still have until April 15th to get the final tally. Once I get the final numbers in, I'll write a nice blog post about my strategy. Maybe it will help someone else! Last Month of Work Other than that, I don't have much to talk about this week. After all, it's been a quiet week. Since I have some space, I want to talk a bit about what the plan is for the next couple of months. As you can probably tell by the headline, March is my final month of working as an engineer. Isn't that exciting?! I have less than 20 days left of working this miserable job before I can finally move on to something better. As soon as I'm done, I'll be releasing the first article of a fifteen part series on why I hate corporate engineering. I've been grinding away on that series for about a year now, so get pumped. However, in the meantime, there's going to be a bit of a transition period. For starters, I'm getting married March 18th, and I'm coming back to work March 20th. From there, I'll finish out the my final tasks and transition my work over to my replacement (still waiting on them). With my first week of freedom, Morgan and I are going to go through the process of changing our last names. At that point, Morgan is going to finish out her school year, and I'm going to start grinding on the site. If I find myself particularly bored (or poor), I may try to do some online TEFL work to make a few bucks before we move. Of course, we do have to host a silly party in June, and we'll probably do some camping. Beyond that, we're just going to try to survive. Added Value Last week, I mentioned that I find a lot of value in music by Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties. Well, this week I dove back into The Wonder Years. Thanks to Spotify, I've been able to just randomly stream everything they've written. I can hardly wait for their new album in April: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccIyBeLEjGM Other than that, I've found quite a bit of value in my free time. It's been nice to be able to work on the site when I want. In fact, it's allowed me to gauge things like analytics which help me decide what's the best content to continue producing. At the moment, my Python series is kicking ass. Oh, I suppose there is something that is always bringing me value and that's Penguins hockey. I just love the Pens, but I feel like they rarely get a mention on my site. In fact, they don't even have a tag. What's up with that?! Coming Soon to The Renegade Coder! I think just about everything coming up has been mentioned like crazy the last few weeks. The only thing I'll add is I have a money management article scheduled for Friday. It's probably not my best work. But, I wrote it awhile back, and I didn't want the content to go to waste. Beyond that, next Friday, I have an article scheduled that talks a bit about why working remote isn't as great as you'd imagine. So, expect me to bring that up again next week. For now, it's back to the grind. Check back in next week!