Personal Thoughts

On Friday, November 28, 2025, I came to attend my Operating Systems class. The class was canceled, so before lunch I spent some time at the career booth working on assignments. While doing that, I thought that with the development of AI, it might become possible to run a one-person business or work as a freelancer and live more freely, doing the work I want to do.

Articles and books about developer soft skills often emphasize the importance of personal branding and building one’s own brand. That is one reason I made this blog, chose a personal nickname, and started trying to brand myself. Branding myself means creating an image that immediately comes to mind when people see me, but I am still not sure what that image should be.

What I do not know is which area I should brand myself in, or what I like enough to become deeply immersed in. If there had been something I truly loved, would I not have found it already? If there had been a field I loved?

One reason I became interested in being a developer was that I heard this field does not look heavily at academic background or credentials. But since I have a fairly decent academic background and am in a good environment, I started wondering whether I should move toward a more specialized and technical field rather than simple web development.

After the semester ended, I reread this post on December 31, 2025, and thought a lot about whether I should delete it. If I was going to delete it, maybe I should not have written it in the first place. Still, I also want to leave a record that I once had these thoughts.

While preparing for employment, there are several common self-introduction questions that I find especially difficult to answer: “When were you most immersed in your life?”, “When did you live the hardest?”, “What experiences produced the best results in your life?”, and so on.

Obviously, if I write ordinary experiences that everyone else has, I will be filtered out immediately. I need to write about experiences where I was deeply immersed, worked hard, or achieved results, but I am still not sure what to choose.

Hackathons, entrance-exam study, competitions, and similar experiences are too expected, so they are not interesting to write about. If a hackathon lasted one to three months, I could probably write about it as an immersive experience, assuming it produced a certain level of quality. But because there have been many situations where I could not leave home for more than a day due to personal circumstances, participating in hackathons was not easy. The same goes for entrance-exam study and competitions.

In any case, I do not want this writing to become a list of excuses. These things are my weaknesses, so once winter break begins, I want to experience true “immersion” in something I like, no matter what.

Tomorrow will be 2026. Recently, YouTube has been full of content about success habits and brain-science-based learning methods. I plan to write about those ideas in my 2025 retrospective.