How time flies! I am 33 years old now and have lived in US for more than 10 years. I have also graduated from University of Utah for almost 5 years now. Wahoo! Each week passed very quickly. Now is the time to pause a little bit and reflect what has been achieved and what could be done better.

Achievements

• Worked on a few projects/papers and made a few submissions to FAST/ATC/HotStorage, though none of them have been accepted yet. The D3 paper gets very close to be accepted by ATC18.
• Mentored four interns. Really enjoyed working with some of them.
• Learned a few new things: AWS S3/Azure, Golang, AWS serverless, and Spark.
• Successful collaboration with a few faculties, include Haryadi Gunawi and Feng Yan.
• Submitted the greencard application, though still waiting for VISA for approval.
• Bought a house at Fremont, CA and moved in in February this year.

Areas to improve

• Make a career plan and see where you want to go in the next ~5 years and work diligently toward the goal.
• Systematically build your knowledge about storage systems. Read more documents/source code of existing storage techniques and systems. Do more hand-on experiments, trying/implementing these techniques/algorithms. Learning on the way.