november

new world

justin • 19 november 2021

i had a pretty good day today. i took coding tests for google and dropbox and i think did fairly well. i didn't get too nervous and i felt comfortable with all the problems, even if i didn't finish some on the dropbox. i've got my final round interview with CME group scheduled for about a week and a half from now. i'm very excited for that. i've been listening to classical music while i work and it's brought out a lot of inspiration in me. it's the perfect kind of energy for me. i like house and techno music for being productive, but sometimes it's almost too mechanical. i had to listen to dvoraks new world symphony for music theory class and write a big paper on it and it got me hooked. now i want to learn and find more to listen to. i think it'd be incredibly beneficial to immerse myself in such a rich genre of music that i don't have that much exposure to. it's very much a new world for me to explore.

i've got a lot of projects i want to work on. i'm actually like, really excited at the idea of it. once the semester is over i'm gonna have to find a way to balance spending time with nicole and also engaging in my passions consistently. i've got my stocks program Premia, my dungeon crawler game i'm making with fellow students, my zelda hack, the zscream editor i'm gonna contribute to, and probably some other things i'm forgetting. i love working with computers and programming. whether it's C++ or assembly it just inspires so much creativity out of me. i want to draw more too. i haven't done enough of that lately. i've got a friend who's trying to write a game from scratch and he wants me to do the art for it. makes me happy when people are interested in my art. i used to run a webcomic on zeniea for many years called zQuest and it was a lot of fun to make it, even if it wasn't very popular. a lot of my life is just a series of spectacular failures that end up helping me grow and learn. and i know because of my adhd that i bounce from interest to interest very quickly so i try not to take any perceived mediocrity to heart. like the way i don't invest all of my time into music or art, that is okay, because it makes me happy when i do it.

now i've just got a metric shit ton of school work i've got to get done. we're in the final stretch though, a couple more weeks and then i've got my whole winter break to do whatever i want. it honestly sounds so nice, but then i rememebr i'll have to drive back home to illinois after new years and that kind of sucks. but i'm getting closer to graduation and i'm landing interviews with good companies so i think my future is bright. i'm trying to be like way optimistic. i like when i'm happy about life, so why not force myself to be by invoking positive language and pointing out the good things. i'm grateful for the opportunities life has given me, despite its hardships.

doctor bonds

justin • 14 november 2021

life updates

well here i am. i'm writing my blog post. so, what am i going to write it about? i've spent the last couple weeks mostly rom hacking and writing in assembly. i'll need to update the oracle of secrets page with the work i've been doing lately. with the help of kan and zarby i've coded an entire menu from scratch for my rom hack. it's pretty impressive honestly, everything else that's left is just small menial tasks that i can get around to eventually. i've also been working with zarby and a few others to start some major refactoring for his editor. it's written in C# and .NET framework with WinForms for the GUI which makes it not very portable as well as just having some pretty rough sections in terms of code complexity and smell. i think it'll be fun to work on though since the code is still in a lot better shape than hyrule magic's code.

i got a final round interview with microsoft scheduled for mid december now. i'm really happy and excited for that. i've got plenty of time to prepare for it now. i originally was not sure how my first round interview went, and even recieved a rejection email from microsoft so initially thought i had been passed up, but when i got the email for the final round i realized the rejection email was for a different position i had applied for, and not the one i had the first round phone interview for. quite the surprise. and then in the same week i got an email from a google recruiter to do their coding test and just tonight i got one from dropbox so i'm on a bit of a hot streak.

financial market analysis

the long term treasury bonds performed pretty poorly today, but data suggests this is hedge funds and speculators going short bonds to bet on higher rates which i believe to be a foolhardy bet. just today it came out that michael "the big short" burry had closed his shorts on TLT, which should tell you what happens when you try to make asymmetric bets against the most pristine form of collateral in the world during an economic recession. the inflation narrative is approaching peak sentiment, which means that a lot of dumb speculators are going to get rugged. i find the downward pressure on bonds to be a welcome buying opportunity honestly. when analyzing the 30Y-10Y spread there is some evidence of a bottom forming which could single more bullishness for equities into the 1H22, but i believe that won't fully materialize in the relative strength of the economy until around christmas. until then, i expect to see volatility and liquidity constraints as evidenced by the bond markets volatility indices like VXTLT and MOVE.

another interesting move today was a surging dollar index. this is particularly interesting for the bond bullish outlook, since inflationists would lead you to believe that the dollar is losing value and becoming weak, however this simply isn't the case. it's attemtping to make new highs YTD, so clearly the underlying strength of the dollar is not an issue. the type of inflation we're seeing is not base monetary, but rather it's an exasperation of the disparity between the supply and demand curve being thrown out of wack by the supply chain crisis. with the university of michigan consumer sentiment preliminary report coming in at a 66.8 versus 71.7 last month, it's clear that consumers are rejecting the higher prices brought on by the supply chain issues. this should cause inflation metrics to roll over soon.