Hours
40 Agency: Braintrust
Expertise
devops eng, rpc optimization, backend support
Mentor
Timesheet
Day ONE
April 25, 2022
End Date
May 31, 2022
Presence
Inactive
Telegram
Bio
🏢 A software engineer with around 5 years of experience in the backend, cloud, and automation 🤖.
🏫 A Graduate part-time student (Masters's) focusing on deep learning and NLP (Natural Language Processing).
✒️ A Blogger writing the occasional article on Medium. Check out my work! https://medium.sayadi.io
➤ Work
🔧 Building with Java and Spring.
☁️ Deploying with AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform.
🧐 Monitoring with the Elastic Stack on Kubernetes.
➤ Life
🤓 Curious about learning new things, always looking for book 📚 recommendations 🤓.
🌴 Passionate about preserving the environment for the future of humanity.
🤔 A believer in philosophical thinking, morality, and empathy.
🧙♂️Loves to geek out on The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Potter. If you know about Lord of the Rings more than I do, I'll buy you a coffee ☕or donate $3 to your favorite charity!
May 2022 Deliverables: 0/0/0%
| Cultural | Values | Read More | Self Assessment | Personal Story |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Communicative | 8 - I feel that others are equally important and deserve the same platform to share their ideas as I do. I often focus on learning their perspective before sharing my own | I have years of experience in providing mental health services in individual & group therapy. Allowing others to speak first shows them that their feelings and ideas are valuable to me, leading to a very fruitful conversaiton. | ||
8 - I enjoy hearing other’s perspectives and utilizing their experiences to augment my own understanding. I am very open to changing my viewpoints at any time | In music creation, we plateau quickly if we do not acknowledge that others’ ideas have equal merit. This mindset has helped me improve at every stage of my music career. | |||
8 - I am highly self-aware but I often focus more on gauging the emotions of others | Having a pulse on the emotions of others helps guide me in how I present thoughts/ideas/feelings. Communication is not about sharing my information, but creating our information together. | |||
Personal | 9 - Sharing experiences lead to deeper connections than sharing words alone | Replace ‘drink’ with ‘experience’. I once shared a roadtrip with an acquaintance, and the novelty of the experience set us on a path of lifelong friendship. | ||
7 - I thrive on spending time with people, but I am often preoccupied with work I have left to accomplish. My goal is to learn to become more present and ‘in the moment’ so that I can create the most value (for all parties) from it | I have improved greatly on this in the past year as I have learned to put my phone away and mentally disengage with ‘work’ while spending time with my mom and dad. These are precious moments. | |||
9 - I deeply care about helping those around me achieve the success in whichever way they define it. I have a good understanding of how to motivate and empower those around me | I have been a head basketball coach, therapist, mentor, and a servant leader for my nonprofit. Giving and serving others, with no expectation of reciprocation, is peace. | |||
Collaborative | 8 - We win and lose as a team. In the absence of ego, we achieve more together. When those around me feel like they shine, we all shine as a result | Growing up a basketball player, I quickly learned the value of the mindset that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. | ||
9 - When you focus on getting the right people that already embody the qualities your culture seeks to establish, you spend less time fixing things on the backend and don’t need to micromanage things like culture or process | In basketball, it only takes 1 teammate to disrupt the culture. When all teammates buy in, you accomplish more with less. | |||
6 - I often remain quiet until I feel deeply educated on a subject and can form a disagreement supported by strong evidence. I prefer the path of least resistance, which is often working with someone to find a solution rather than simply saying I disagree. I need to improve my willingness to challenge ideas - not for the sake of being right, but to drive the topic to new heights through collaboration | A lesson I learned in music that applies everywhere - remove your ego and allow your subconscious creativity to shine. This yields feelings/thoughts/ideas that are fully genuine and drive collaboration further. | |||
Devoted | 7 - I think about how every decision I make now impacts the future for myself, my peers, and Harmony as a whole. I want the work I do, now matter how mundane the task, to support something greater than myself. I am a life long student | At the beginning of my music journey, one thing became very clear - we are always in ‘edit’ mode. This means every moment is an opportunity for improvement. | ||
8 - The little things allow the big things to shine. Nothing is insignificant if it supports the larger goals at play | Music is like blockchain. Once a piece of audio is printed and the track is sent to mastering, it exists in that state forever. I take this approach with everything I do. | |||
9 - I am quite foolish - I take many risks. Most of them are calculated, but some are not. If it feels right, I go for it and I jump right in to the deep end. I am hungry for diversity in my experiences, accomplishments, and who I work with. Diversity allows for growth | On a whim, two days before tour began, I left everything behind to join a 3-month full USA tour as a tour manager/bus driver/events coordinator. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but the rewards were priceless. | |||
Aligned | 9 - The mission is not mine. It is ours. We all play an equally important role in creating something beautiful and I look forward to sharing the tough work yet also sharing the joy of a job well done | To me, no accomplishment is worth experiencing if I am celebrating alone. | ||
8 - I get anxiety when things are in chaos, but I simultaneously recognize its value. I have learned be willing to jump in and accept the chaos knowing that I don’t have to have all of the answers right away - they are revealed as you progress. There is beauty found in giving up my internal desire to control and allow myself to merge with the chaos | In every chaotic environment I have explored, I have found the greatest opportunities for personal growth | |||
8 - I am a dreamer. I gravitate towards endeavors that are high risk and crazy, but have the power to create something that will last much longer than myself. My dream is to positively impact other people so that their lives are enriched long after I am gone | My 50 year dream is to serve serve 10B people through our efforts with Harmony, 10,000 patients through my medical non profit, impact 100,000 lives through my music, and most importantly - have wonderful relationships with my family | |||
Authentic | 7 - Sometimes I take the path of least resistance, putting others’ needs above my own. I want to improve at speaking my heart authentically even when it may be hard to do so | In therapy, I help my clients learn how to create and maintain healthy boundaries. I need to be better at taking my own advice 😊 | ||
7 - I have improved on this over recent years to where I now feel much more confident in making decisions. I have spent many years in life being indecisive because I would spend more time thinking of every individual perspective and worrying about how each decision could negatively impact even one person. I have learned to find the right balance, but I am still improving on follow through | When sending my medical teams to Haiti, we often go in 2 groups over 2 weeks. Last year, I withdrew my first team early and canceled my 2nd team due to safety reasons. While my heart hurt that we would serve less people in need and a part of me wanted to push forward, the uncertainty surrounding our safety became my only concern. | |||
9 - I used to be a 6, but I have become stronger in who I am and I now don’t take mistakes personally. I used to grind until I reached perfection before sharing ideas with anyone out of fear of being incorrect. Now, I am excited to make mistakes because mistakes accelerate learning and offer an opportunity to build connection with my peers. By fearing mistakes, you stop taking the risks needed to drive the cart forward. The truth is, nobody has it all figured out and we should be boasting in our areas of improvement - in doing so we actually empower those around us | I never learned how to make the game winning 3 point shot without being willing to take the difficult shots along the way. | |||
Technical | 7 - I always recognize ways I would like to improve. I have never viewed myself as “the” superstar in any arena - I have a strong desire to focus on diversification of experience, skills, and maintaining a mindset of how I can learn from others rather than what I can teach others. When it comes to being a servant leader and being able to create meaningful connections with others, I do feel like a top 1% superstar. More than anything, I enjoy empowering others and have a strong sense of empathy | From the moment I counseled my first client when I was 14 years old, to becoming a life coach, a basketball coach, and ultimately founder of my non profit - servant leadership was at the heart of it all. | ||
6 - I learn the tools as I go, which is not as proactive as I would like to be. There are many platforms I would like to be efficient in but I often keep my workload so full that I force myself to have to learn these skills (like Notion, for example) when the need calls for it | My tool is empathy. It guides everything I do - and I am always mindful of how I can improve on this | |||
8 - Everything can become relevant to team goals if we are not rigid in our thinking | An example of this is situational favorability in leadership - in different contexts, different leadership attributes are more effective than others. This begins with empathy - recognizing how those around you shape their experiences and how the collective functions in the face of various emotional climates | |||
Potential | 8 - Every moment is an opportunity for growth. I often throw myself into uncomfortable situations to give myself more opportunities to grow. 10x is not overnight, but a lifelong accomplishment | Exponential growth, in my case, comes from diversity in experience, in the company I keep, and by optimizing my work flow | ||
9 - I look at everyone and everything as an opportunity to learn. Complacency is the enemy | The more I know, the more I realize how much I don’t know | |||
7 - With myself - I always challenge my existing beliefs and play devil’s advocate to push myself to look at every situation in a new light. With others, I pick my battles. In areas where I have a lot of knowledge, I challenge ideas quite openly. In areas I do not have much knowledge, I stay quiet and listen. I quietly challenge beliefs in my mind, but my actions will merge with the status quo until I have enough knowledge to suggest a better path. I do openly challenge anytime I feel those around me are not thinking critically, even if my knowledge on the topic is low | I remind myself not to assume that the people with the loudest voices have it all figured out. In reality, none of us do and challenging beliefs/norms/ideas/perspectives, in a healthy way, drives growth. | |||
Impact | 9 - I always think of the big picture and the big impact of small things. I always keep a mental goal of how my work will impact the people around me and at large both directly and indirectly | Every career path I have lived has centered entirely on helping and serving other people. My ROI is seeing others happy and successful | ||
7 - I sometimes spend too much time thinking about the big picture (with tasks) and need to spend more time on individual tasks themselves so I am only focusing on one at a time. When I have a large to do list (which I always do) I need to get better at focusing on one at a time | I am a compulsive list maker 😆 | |||
8 - I adapt quickly and focus on how I can utilize the moment to its fullest potential. Sometimes you have to adjust your idea of optimized process or your measure of success as chaos in front of you unfolds. Sometimes the ROI is an improved sense of comfort in chaotic situations, if nothing else! | Chaos is novelty. Novelty hacks the process of flow. Flow silences ego to allow new experiences in creativity, personal growth, and deeper connection with others. I find flow when I allow chaos to be a tool. |