Living abroad as an expatriate has always been my dream, at least since I was still a student. I tried to achieve it multiple times, through different paths. In my 3rd year of my bachelor's degree, I applied for internship positions in Malaysia but didn't get them. I applied for scholarships to England, Japan, and Australia, and even received a Letter of Acceptance from a university but didn't manage to secure the scholarship. I was once offered a job in Singapore but was forced to do it remotely due to work visa constraints (plus the Covid-19 situation).

Those who are close to me know that my main destination was actually Japan. I learned Japanese every day (only through Duolingo though) and actively applied to all English-speaking positions in Japan I could find since around mid-2024 but still no luck. Until one of my coworkers left to move to Estonia. Before she left, I made some small talk and asked her to let me know if she found a suitable position for me there. Months later, she actually shared a job opening, and then, as I teased a bit at the end of my Persib Back2Back note, my journey began. I finally got the long-awaited chance and made the big decision to bring my family to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.

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The long awaited exam is finally done. I have been slowly preparing for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam since mid-2024 by reading books and documentation and it’s finally realised (and passed!) just last weekend. The exam itself did not start smoothly, which we will go to later in this note, as I will share my experience. While usually people share their tips to excel in an exam (just like I did on Google PCSE post), I will share things that you should not do in preparing for the exam, in addition to my learning materials.

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It all began in 2003. My brother was watching Persib get beaten. Can’t even remember which team did it. What I do remember was Bobotoh going off, calling for Marek Śledzianowski to get sacked. That was my first memory of watching Persib on TV. Twenty-two years later, I watched Kevin Mendoza and co lift the BRI Liga 1 trophy with my very own eyes.

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Holiday was just right at the door, I had a pile of unread books and tons of unplayed games on Steam. What did I do instead? Correct, revamping the notebook [re: nickname of this blog] for the I-lost-my-count times 😎. So the reason for another revamping is because I felt the design was too mundane (which I intended to make, since I felt the even previous version was too decorated haha) and didn’t show my true character. So I spent days searching for a true self unique personal website design, but online references mostly only have the classic portfolio layout where it has a big picture of the site owner as the landing page (like how this notebook used to be a few years back) and the rest of the page are standard website layout. 

But then, I remembered I saw a fully functioning Windows XP-themed website (too bad I can’t remember the website) and thought, hmm, my old friends know me as the computer expert (even I'm not that expert, but they ask for my help when their Instagram accounts are hacked!), I have a Computer Science degree, and I work in the IT field with Macbook as the daily driver. Probably a Macbook and terminal-themed design suits me well! Thus, I added exploring the CSS to mimic the terminal UI as one of the action items of the ongoing notebook refactor project. The project itself already started around July last year when I decided to be actively writing again, and apart of revamping the design, I also configured the CI pipeline and created a bash script to do a daily backup to Google Drive.

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Back in college, I managed to finish my final project in less than two weeks leaving me plenty of free time. Once my friends found out about this, they started knocking at my door, desperate for help with their own projects (okay, a bit dramatic, but you get the idea!). Intrigued with the opportunity to learn about many unknown, scientifically-unique projects, I officially opened a workshop in my house. 

I helped both in technical things (re: code) as well as report writing. Disclaimer: as far as I understood, I didn’t cross any ethical lines as most of the time I’d guide them with suggestions, sometimes contribute a bit of code, but never do everything for them, and foremost I made sure my friend understood what they created & wrote. This was a labor of friendship, not profit—my “payment” was often cakes or, more commonly, a mandatory FIFA match as part of the consultation deal. One of the most interesting projects is my wife’s (then girlfriend), which is to build a search engine for Quran verses, but the queries and the verses need to be normalized with Indonesian-spelling first. Made with PHP 6 years ago together with my wife, now, I have decided to re-write it into Python as this is my most starred (re: 2 stars) GitHub repo yet!

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