Day in the Life — Spicy Circuitz

Disclaimer

Greetings, internet bot and any curious soul who stumbles on this quite corner of the web. I’m about to bore you with some details about my day to day life. This is going to be bit of word vomit so if my ADHD comes out a bit I apologize in advance.

Post-College

Since graduating college the days have been kind of running together. It was a very odd feeling. I became a bit aimless and felt depressed after graduating despite on paper I should’ve been living the dream. I had to see someone in order to get through this initial slump. I had never realized it but my whole life I had been working towards on goal. That was to do well enough in order to get enough scholarship money to go to college. Then get a desk job and live a stable life. Specifics varied but I always knew I wanted to do something in engineering. I would say I grinded in highschool in order to accomplish this but honestly highschool was pretty easy. The real grind came from trying to be involved in extra circulars and working a job starting at 14 to help make ends meet.

Turning point?

I decided to see a professional about this and she pointed out some good things to me. Essentially I never really had a plan after reaching this point. I needed goals and to rediscover my hobbies. My senior year of college I was worried about the job market since many tech companies had laid off tons of engineers to balance out the excessive hiring done during covid, while blaming it on “AI” in order to not scare the shareholders. This meant I had to grind in order to put myself in the best position to find a job. My senior year I worked my Host job at a restaurant, held an undergrad research position, and was attempting to pump out personal projects every few weeks. This came at the cost of many hobbies, relations, and I even blame this period in my life for my balding and having to resort to shaving my head in order to not look like a fent addict. I am working on improving myself I think a routine is good for me. Quitting nicotine and drinking on weekdays has been helping my health and in turn my mental state.

General Routine

This is specific to weekdays.

Morning

I wake up at 6:30 am. I usually listen to a podcast or a youtube video while I shower and shave my head and beard. After I finish getting ready for the day and having breakfast I drive to work at about 7:30 am and usually arrive around 7:45 am. My day to day at work varies a bit depending on what I am working on but in general I work on resolving bugs and implementing new features. They are pushing us to integrate ai more into our workflows and I will admit it has increased my productivity but I don’t believe these current architectures are enough for us to be able to replace classical coding completely. I’m honestly sick of talking to people who think they understand how ai works when fundamentally it is just an auto-complete algorithm with a bunch of fancy statistics. Yet if I say that I think pretending it is actually intelligent is a bad idea or how most companies over eagerly integrating ai are losing money I would likely loose my job. At the very least I would fall in bad grace which is not a place I want to be. Luckily I’m not paid enough to think or worry about that stuff. But the larp is annoying and getting old. I get an hour for lunch any time between 11:00am and 1:00pm. I usually just go to lunch whenever I reach a good stopping point provided it is at least noon. Unless I get hungry earlier.

Afternoon

I typically drive home for lunch and have leftovers of whatever I cooked the day before. I only have like 3 recipes I stick with for the ease and price. Which is typically Spaghetti, Tacos, or Pizza. I always pair this with some fruit like an apple or orange. I also try and eat a salad, olives, or nuts in an attempt to balance out my diet. After eating and watching youtube, lately I have been watching lots of Counter-Strike videos, I drive back to the office. I would eat at the office but not one really eats there or talks that much so I prefer to go home and have my own space. Once I get to work it ends up being more of the same. Depending on how much I get pulled away to help my co-workers or how difficult my current issues are I will typically resolve 3-5 tickets a day. At 4:50 we have our daily standup where we just say what we have worked on that day and what we are planning on working on the next day.

Evening

Once I get home usually around 5:30 depending on if I had to deploy code that day. I generally start cooking dinner/lunch for the next day which is one of the meals listed above. I also recently bought a house. I am very fortunate for this and this is another reason I feel guilty when I feel like I am missing something from my life. I am unsure what else I could be expecting I have a stable job, a house, great friends, and plenty of family. Anyway the house comes with a lot of work so after dinner I try to clean at least one room and do any repairs as needed. Earlier this week I had to repair my garage door opener for example. Once I reach a stopping point I will generally get on my computer. I no longer have any tv subscriptions in order to save money so watching tv is pretty much out of the question. On my computer I will do various things, but in order of most common to least common I’d say it is as follows.

Game with Friends
Work on Personal Coding Projects
Watch Youtube/Twitch or other resources for streaming for free
Create Ai Art
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The games I play with my friends vary but lately it has been CS, Battlefield, Phasmophobia, or Fortnite. The game matters less than just doing it together so I am not too picky. I do at least try to do a daily routine on Kovaak’s which takes like 30 minutes. I am actually terrible and usually rank in the bottom 50% which is why I am aiming for consistency on doing routines. I started in the bottom 20% so I think this method is paying off. Naturally this varies by scenario. I struggle with smoothness but my flicks are pretty good. I finally got a new mouse that let me fine tune my dpi. I found my golden number which is 5800 DPI and on Counter-Strike my sensitivity is 2.19. I like to be able to make big movements with small adjustments.

My personal projects vary. Lately I have been working on this site here and there, but I my main project has been a Gameboy Emulator. It’s mostly done but I need to make the interface which I hate doing in C so I am kind of procrastinating on this last part. I often do small projects for a little bit then get board half way through and stop. It’s a bad habit and I wish I followed through on more projects but it has to keep my interest for me to stay invested. As for the Ai “art” I am not much of drawer, but I want to be able to create images that I do not have the skills to. I run models locally and handle it all in house for free using free diffusion models and LORA’s I can find online. It’s just a little hobby. I did try to monetize it back in college when money was tight, but I considered this unethical since the models are trained on stolen art from real artist. Now I just use it to create stuff for myself and sometimes put them on this site. Although I’ve only uploaded one. I used to have a larger collection I lost access to when my college laptop died and I never brought that over to my pc. I will try to upload more and hopefully higher quality stuff. I’ve been playing around with lighting a lot lately but am missing overall inspiration on an idea to attempt to prompt.

Until Later

Well this has been an interesting hour and thirty minute rambling. I just needed to get my thoughts somewhere which other than trying to promote the internet revival movement is a secondary aim of this site. I wish you the best and if you’re still around and not a bot I would like to thank you for reading this far. I do have a twitter I recently created feel free to follow @SpicyCircuitz

Stay Spicy.