An introduction & final words.
I’m the new kid on the block and I’m here to say goodbye.
Hi. My name is Chester and I live on a tiny island called Singapore. I’m 20 years old and yet I can’t seem to find a nice picture of myself so this will have to suffice.
Yup, that’s me sound asleep at a museum. Okay I actually really like museums but was just beat that day. Alright, back to my introduction.
I grew up and studied in Singapore all my life. In May this year, I officially graduated from a local polytechnic with a Diploma in Information Technology. And now it’s time for the goodbye.
In Singapore, it is compulsory for all males to serve in the army for 2 years. We call it National Service, or NS for short. To cut to the chase, I’ll be enlisting soon. In fact, I’ll be enlisting tomorrow.
A lot of people have asked me how I’m feeling about my enlistment. I haven’t been able to give them a proper answer because I’m not too certain myself.
Nervous? Oh yes, definitely nervous. I get nervous easily. Scared? Nope, I’m not scared. I think it’ll be kinda fun. Who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don’t dread going into the army, but I do dread losing my freedom. And perhaps the idea of losing my freedom has driven me to do more within my last couple of days before enlisting. Here’s what I’ve done in the past week.
The previous weekend, from Saturday till Monday morning, I camped out at a friend’s place. We were participating in ReactRiot, a 48 hour hackathon. We built chorus, a real-time music sharing web app. Feel free to check out our submission here. It’s littered with bugs but hey, we still built it within 48 hours and I’m pretty satisfied with what we managed to accomplish.
During the week, I also built and deployed Monitor. Monitor is a site I use for monitoring the prices of certain games on G2A. The frontend was built with React (you can probably tell I really like React) and Recharts, which is a super neat charting library for React. The backend was built by a friend of mine. This was a project I had started working on since May but never really got any work done due to procrastination and work (but mainly procrastination). 🙃
On Wednesday I made my first visit to Singapore’s newly opened Apple Store. I made an appointment and handed my phone in to get the battery replaced. It was done within three hours. Yet another thing I had delayed for months because well, the Apple Store wasn’t open yet and other service centers were extremely frustrating to work with. *cough* A.LAB *cough*… And also due to procrastination. 🙃🙃
On Saturday night, I published my first Medium story which has garnered over a whooping 35 views! It’s not a huge number but I’m grateful for everyone who took the time to read it. And you might have guessed it. Yup, this too was something I had in mind for a long time but never really got around to doing it. 🙃🙃🙃
Lastly, I got to catch up with many of my friends this past week. Good food, good company and glittery tattoo stickers. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Maybe losing my freedom isn’t such a bad thing after all. I mean, it definitely brought out my productive side I never knew existed. A wise man once said:
Procrastination isn’t a dragon you have to slay once, its a parasite you have to consistently exterminate.
— Definitely not Chester, 2017
Here’s to more weeks of successful extermination. 🥂
