The Journey to Invincibility

Background

In this post, I want to share a bit about what I’ve been doing up to this point in terms of personal development. It’s almost five years since I graduated with a bachelor’s degree from university, and I’ve seen a lot of younger people who haven’t been graduated for long. Sometimes I see that they actually have the potential to be much better, but they don’t aim for it.

Whenever I find people who could actually improve a lot–and I do mean A LOT–but chose not to, I think to myself, “Did they actually choose it, or is it that they simply don’t know how to realize their potential?”

Be prepared for a section dedicated to the manga Vagabond. If you’re following the manga, you might have noticed that the title and description of this post is a reference to Miyamoto Musashi’s pursuit of invincibility and Yagyu Sekishusai’s answer when Musashi asked him, “What does it mean to be invincible?” If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.

This post is mostly just me sharing my own experience. The target audience is people younger than me, but might be applicable to some more experienced people as well.

I don’t think I’m that good yet at this point, but since I managed to grow this far I think this might be a good thing to share with people who are still not sure whether they will be able to make it or not.

How I Ended Up Majoring in Computer Science

I studied at Universitas Multimedia Nusantara, majoring in computer science. It’s not among the elite universities in the country and it’s established in 2006, so the curriculum and learning environment wouldn’t compare to better universities such as Insitut Teknologi Bandung or Universitas Indonesia, which is among the top in the country. I think it should compare somewhat well enough with Bina Nusantara University, which is considered among one of the better Indonesian universities despite not being in the elite rank, in both terms though. I graduated from Universitas Multimedia Nusantara in 2013.

The first time I got interested in computers was when I was still 2 years old. I lived together with my grandparents, an uncle, and an aunt from my mother’s side. Yes, I can still remember a lot of things from that time. The then-girlfiend–now, the wife–of my uncle worked in a bank and one day she brought a CRT computer monitor to our home. I thought it was a TV and asked it to be turned on so I can watch cartoons on it, since I’ve never seen any other thing that has the shape of a CRT monitor that’s not a TV. I was told it’s not a TV and can’t be used that way.

I never used any actual computers until I was around 7 or 8 years old, I think. My father’s office got computers for their employees. Since my father was working 7 days a week, both me and my sister would be brought to the office whenever my late mother couldn’t take care of us due to some other business. My father worked for a hotel/resort, so we had playgrounds for children at his office. But sometimes I went to the accounting office and the staffs let me use their computers to learn how to use word processors, spreadsheets, and printers, or just to play a game.

My family got a computer in 2003, but the only Internet connection available was dial up connection that’s both slow and pretty expensive, so I didn’t use it often. I only used the computer to learn a bit of Windows batch scripting, system administration, access control, and how to deal with Windows malware I got from friends’ floppy disks and USB thumb drives.

I started to be a regular user of the Internet and the web in 2006, back when I still have to go to Internet cafes to get Internet connections. Most of my friends went to internet cafes to play online games, but I preferred to play offline console games on PS2. So I never went to Internet cafes until one of my classmate asked me to join an online bulletin board along with him. The board was about an anime we were watching–it was Bleach, in case any of you wondering.

There was a cheap unlimited Internet subscription package available for my area in 2008, so I asked my parents to subscribe to it and they finally did–I had been asking for better home Internet access for a few years, but the available subscription packages were too expensive for us. So I started spending my time watching YouTube videos, some of them being tutorial videos about things I had been interested in but has no access to properly learn about them…up to this time at least. I learned some Japanese, pencil illustration techniques, and Linux during this time period–I was (and am still) interested in languages, art, sciences, and computers. I later dumped Windows XP installed on the computer with Linux Mint.

Since I had a wide range of interests yet I did not so well at school due to spending most of my time outside school for self-studying things that was not taught at school, I didn’t aim for the top universities and I applied for random majors. I applied for computer science and information systems majors at Universitas Multimedia Nusantara, and I applied for computer science, Japanese literature, and visual communication design (despite being color-blind) majors at Bina Nusantara University. I considered psychology major too.

I ended up studying computer science at Universitas Multimedia Nusantara. Continuing with the learning style I had since high school, my grade kind of sucked at university. But it’s still considerably good though, since most of them still falls under A, B, and C ranges due to the things I taught myself were somewhat relevant to the exams. I was also writing a tech-related blog (in Indonesian), which content mostly came from my self-study or me teaching my juniors at university or me discussing with some random people about tech.

Joining the Workforce

On March 2013, I got a message from Belinda Rahmadara, Bukalapak’s only recruiter at the time. I was asked if I’m interested to join Bukalapak as a system administrator. Actually, earlier at the same day, I’ve just come back from a job interview to become a system administrator for a metalworking company in South Tangerang which I decided to pass because I wasn’t really into the boss pushing me to drop my other commitments to work full-time there. I passed on Bukalapak at this time, since I figured they would need a full-time system administrator while I couldn’t take the full time system administrator role at the metalworking company because I was still working as a teaching assistant at Universitas Multimedia Nusantara while working on my undergraduate thesis.

My activities during the last semester is pretty much similar with what I had been doing before, but with some part-time web development projects going on to get me some pocket money. I was also thinking about what I want to do in the future. I didn’t have any plans on what contribution I actually wanted to make to the society, but I wanted to see how good the world’s best minds actually are.

Despite me having not-so-stellar academic scores, a lot of people around my environment told me that I was pretty good since I could understand and explain concepts unknown to them and do things they couldn’t do. While it might be a praise from them, I didn’t take it as such since that would make me think about the concepts which surface I couldn’t even scratch and things impossible for me to do with the abilities I had.

In a way, I felt like a sheltered person who didn’t have any actual ability beyond the environment I grew up in. So I made it my goal to be actually good so I can stay good even in unfamiliar, or even hostile, environments. Therefore, I decided to apply for software engineer position at Bukalapak on July 2013 soon after I finished my undergraduate thesis defense.

None of my acquaintance worked for a startup back then, and Bukalapak’s engineering team were almost entirely from the country’s top universities. I had friends at those universities and I consider them far better than me in terms of abilities. So I took it up as a challenge, and also grinding my niche skills outside job by enrolling myself to Swiss German University’s master of information technology program, focusing in information security.

Work, Study, Friends, and Family

I worked at Bukalapak to fund my study at Swiss German University, with some disagreement with friends plus some family issues to be taken care of at the timeframe, and I had to make time for everything. I must say this period is possibly the most hellish, spartan personal development period I had went through so far.

When I started working in Bukalapak, they have a few more senior engineers that mentored me. I think the CTO wasn’t exactly the kind of mentor suitable for weak-hearted fresh graduates without strong basics in algorithms or software architecture, so for the first few months I got scolded for my mistakes every now and then. I could deal with that reasonably well though, and I was actually quite happy to learn something–despite the method of teaching being harsh, I focused more to the message. But seems like up to that point I was the only fresh grad who managed to do that, according to the more senior employees.

There were three more senior back end engineers when I joined, and one junior back end engineer. The junior engineer resigned within my first month, seems to be disgruntled with our CTO’s method of teaching. There was another back end engineer around my age joining soon after. He didn’t get scolded as far as I see, and I think he was way better than me. He didn’t talk much with us though, and after a while he stopped coming to the office. I never knew why.

I learned from the senior engineers as much as I could, until all of them ended up resigning within around 1 year from the time I joined them. So I ended up as the sole remaining back end engineer from the generation. We had a few new engineers joining us, whom I helped to mentor. But being the sole survivor of the old times would leave me with the one with the most knowledge regarding the internal working of our system and the most connection within the company, so a lot of problems went straight through me.

This was around the time when I got busy with study. A lecturer asked me to join his research and I agreed to join, but he was pretty demanding on it. So after a while I figured I couldn’t do both his research and my job at the same time, so I resigned from the research. Other subjects also gave me lots of headache since I had to read a lot of materials, write assignment papers, and so on.

My mother started to fell sick. We didn’t know the cause, but we all thought it was some muscle problem because she was feeling back pains. Only a few months later, we figured that it was latter-stage breast cancer. So we need to take care of her properly, it was possible to heal but it needs a lot of things going well for it to happen.

The time period was still within 1-2 years of graduation from Universitas Multimedia Nusantara, so the relation between friends are still quite close. Yet, I stopped coming to any gathering with friends. One of my friends seem to have some personal issues, but he vented it out using his public social media accounts he also use to connect with his clients for freelance work. I told him that using public account for personal venting purpose might be a bad idea, and…I ended up getting shunned by everyone.

Well, I didn’t tell them about my family problems though. But I did tell them about how the workload and study’s going whenever I need another person’s perspective to make decisions. Well…I think either I was misunderstood as bragging or I was told that’s what I get for being greedy.

At this point, Bukalapak recruited a really solid engineer. He’s only one year older than me, yet he understood and capable of so many things I couldn’t even get a grasp on. He started teaching me stuff, which would be the one of the main points for the next section.

My mother passed away on April 2015, and I was severely burnt out around that point from both work and study.

The Second Graduation

I managed to graduate from Swiss German University with a master’s degree in information technology on August 2015. Soon after graduation, I had to fulfill some requirements for getting all the remaining documents from the university. I managed to finish everything by November 2015.

Starting from here, I focused on learning what I’ve missed on the resources I managed to gain by not needing to go to university anymore. This is where the engineer I mentioned before played his role to the fullest. He would be teaching me for a while until I graduated from Bukalapak, passing a lot of his thoughts, viewpoints, and knowledge.

My role was changed from software engineer to security engineer on August 2016, due to Bukalapak hiring Herdian Nugraha, a student who managed to penetrate Bukalapak’s system through ImageTragick vulnerability. We didn’t have any security engineer before, and technically I was the one who managed the system’s security at the side while working on software engineering roles. We needed someone to mentor Herdian, and I was assigned to that task.

By the time I left Bukalapak on May 2017, most of things I broke during the spartan period in many aspects of my life are already fixed. I spent the whole 2016 focusing on that, while also started a habit of buying physical books to read. I used to read e-books since my undergraduate years, but it’s pretty inconvenient since I had to read it either on laptop or smartphone.

I got a Kindle as a farewell gift from my coworkers at Bukalapak. I’ve been using that to the fullest by putting every e-books I’m interested to in it, and I read it every day when commuting.

After going through all that, I’d say I learned the most when I read books by myself. I don’t immediately understand most of it, especially if I’m reading books on subjects completely out of my area of expertise such as anthropology and advanced mathematics.

I’d say the most important thing I’ve got so far is not the knowledge and skills itself, but the experience of going through shitty situations and conflicts with many other people along the way of simply trying to improve myself. My abilities indeed improved, but I think most of the improvements came from a shift of perspective instead of from actually training myself in every single skill I can think of like I did unsuccessfully during my time as an undergraduate student.

I’m still not the best communicators around, but I think I managed to improve a lot without myself noticing. I’ve always been a person with quite a temper, and I’m still quite easy to piss off. But at least I can manage to be pissed off in a more graceful way right now compared to years ago.

Some Lessons from Vagabond

Remember when I said there will be lots of Vagabond reference earlier in this post? I didn’t start to read Vagabond until some time in 2015, so I didn’t think of Musashi when making my decision back then. But we all can learn from Musashi’s journey, as I had when I read the manga. The manga is a work by Inoue Takehiko, who also did Slam Dunk which is quite popular in Indonesia at a time.

Shinmen Takezo was a village boy from Sakushu. Together with his friend Hon’iden Matahachi, they were considered the stronger kids in the village. Matahachi wanted to go to war and make a name for themselves as warriors, so he and Takezo joined the battle of Sekigahara as soldiers. They were on the losing side, but they survived the battle together.

They met a woman as they tried to survive after the battle. During their stay in the woman’s house, the house was raided by a gang of bandits. Matahachi and the woman fled to live together peacefully, while Takezo fought the bandits and survived. Takezo would then come back to Sakushu and change his name to Miyamoto Musashi, then go on a quest to become the strongest swordsman bearing the title “invincible under the heavens”.

During beginning of the quest, he fought many people, some stronger than him by a wide margin. There were times he was scared and fled the fight, but he always came back and trained himself to be stronger. Since he aimed to be the invincible, he went to fight the one bearing the title “invincible” at the time. It was Yagyu Sekishusai.

Upon his meeting with Sekishusai, he was overwhelmed with Sekishusai’s calmness despite being a sickly old man. Then, he asked Sekishusai what does it mean to be invincible.

Invincible…it’s merely a word.

Sekishusai then remembered the time when he was young, together with young In’ei, challenging Kami’izumi Ise no Kami Hidetsuna who was known as a master swordsman at the time. Sekishusai challenged him multiple times, and always losing. The master swordsman asked him, “What is the way of the sword?”

Young Sekishusai and In’ei’s way of the sword was, “Myself, defeating my opponent with my power, with my strength, with my existence.” The master asked them, “Why would you dedicate your lives to that? Do you truly believe that the way of the sword is so trivial?”

My sword is one with heaven and earth. With my way, the sword need not even be present.

Old Sekishusai then repeated the words of Kami’izumi Ise no Kami Hidetsuna to Musashi.

I wouldn’t spoil the story more than what’s needed for this post, so please read the manga if you’re interested. Musashi’s life as depicted in Vagabond is pretty complex, and he’s very human. I consider it among the best manga I’ve ever read.

Conclusion

Our abilities isn’t a separate entity from our own selves. In fact, our abilities are just a part of it. To improve ourselves as a human being is to improve our abilities.

There are resources from renowned philosophers regarding this, but I happened to be impressed with Miyamoto Musashi as depicted in Vagabond enough to make me remember the conversation regarding invincibility when I started writing this post.

It might not be easy to grasp, but I think as long as we keep aiming to improve ourselves and keep working hard on it, it will reflect on our actions. Since our abilities are judged by how appropriate the actions we take given the context and situation, the abilities will reflect the “self” behind the actions.

To improve ourselves, maybe we should start with what we expected our ideal self should be. In my case, it’s mostly about being good enough to survive in unfamiliar and hostile situations.

Improving ourselves is definitely not easy and tiresome. Heck, I even fell into depression during the hellish period and I don’t dare to say that I’m already good at what I was aiming to improve. But what really counts is the reasoning on the choices we consciously made in order to make everything better, regardless of the end result.