This is a conversational transcript from a January 10, 2025 YouTube video by Phil Choi documenting a day in his life as a software engineer. The chunk mixes casual personal scenes (family, sleep disruption, exercise, boxing gym) with a collaborative coding session focused on team management features (Register Player, bench/practice squad, routing) and short technical tips about web scraping tools (Python: Selenium + BeautifulSoup; Node.js: Puppeteer + Cheerio). Phil also reflects on productivity habits—arguing for doing work well rather than rushing and outsourcing without understanding.
Chapters
How many people do you think we can get people to touch? Let's start the slate at zero now. Yeah. 10. 10. Okay, let's try 10. First quarter. First quarter. Gotta make him. Okay. Okay, okay. Let's be cool in front of Uncle Minnie, huh? All right. O. It's okay. It's okay. All right, let's get started. It's tough, dude, because it's not just physically tiring. It's, like, tiring on your, like, motions, you know? You know when your dad, like, ever hit you and he was like. Like, this is hurting me more than it hurts you. Totally understand. Today we got Gabe, Jocelyn, and I think we might meet Shay at the boxing gym. I do need to fix some things on the website as well, but not much. Slow, slow, slow, slow. Starts for 20, 25, and then you got to work on the course, too. Yeah, I think it's negative seven today. Really? Really? Yeah. I grew up thinking freezing was 28 degrees Fahrenheit, but then somehow it turned into 32 in the conversion. It's like times 2 plus 32 or something like that. I don't remember. Dude, I don't know what it is, dude. Like, people are, like, so toxic. Like, I'm so toxic to myself. I put myself in bad positions all the time. I don't know what it is. Like, you know, you're putting yourself in a bad position, but you put yourself in there anyways. Oh, it's the holidays. Okay. ALITA S. Ice cream, strawberry cake, watching a movie, and it's like, okay, it's like, not that bad, but I don't understand how the human mind works. Why do you have to celebrate with, like, something toxic? It's. It's horrible. Just like when you put off work or something, you know, like when you're coding, you put it off. You put it off, you put it off. And then it's just like putting yourself in a toxic situation. You know, you're gonna have to pay for it later, but you do it anyways. It's crazy dry January. Not drinking this month. Focusing on health and the course. So I'll be there. I'll be at 70kg by March. How many people do you think we can get people to test? Let's start the slate at zero. Now. Yeah, 10. 10. Okay, let's try 10. First quarter. First quarter. My name is Phil. I became a senior developer after the age of 30. You know, if you had any kind of instance of trying to finish or cheating yourself, let me know in the comments because, you know, I really want to read it and we can motivate each other. What's better, dude, than hot coffee, Cigarette, cold air? Yeah, I'm all warmed up now. Yeah, my kid woke up at like 4 in the morning and he was like, my wife, like, she was like, ah, like, I gotta work. Like, okay. So I like, I fucking took him to the room and he just like try to put him to sleep but he wouldn't go to sleep. So I just closed my eyes and he was just like punching me in the face. Oh my God, he keeps breaking this horn and then he wakes up and he's like, fix it for me. Oh, damn. Like, it comes off super easy. Yeah, yeah. So I have to fix it every time. I'll be there already in five minutes. No problem though. All right, so today, Gabe, let's check managers and players. SAP game. Hey, how's it going? Good, good. How about yourself? Pretty good, Pretty good. Yeah. Just started back class up today, so just campus all day and then running home late. But what are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do about it? You know? But yeah, I thought you're. So you graduate in June? Yeah, like May. June, yeah. Oh, we finished up the managed team player soccer team entity, the managed bench player soccer API, research on off state change REACT took form and all this kind of stuff. So today let's do the Register player because that's part of team management. So like you can just make a player and he'll end up on your bench if you have room and yeah, let's, let's get that done. Is that cool? Okay. All right. Yeah. Have you ever like done data scraping or anything like that? No, no. I'll teach you about that later on. We kind of did. What do you, what do you use with to do that? Like a Python script or something. Or you can use. So there's Beautiful Soup with Python and stuff like that in Selenium, Beautiful Soup is like an HTML parser, but Node JS has. So on Python you'd use Selenium and Beautiful Soup, Right. And then on Node JS you'd use Puppeteer and Cheerio. And they're the same thing, but not the same thing. But I mean they work very similarly, just different languages. But Cheerio is equivalent. So if you ever have like a task to like scrape something, maybe Cheerio would be something to look into. So we have team Manage team and then from there we have. So we can manage the team. Now we have. We're going to work on Register Player and we have the bench practice Squad. That's all done. And now we need to work on edit, profile and chat. And then we should be finished with what we said we're going to do. So let's do the register player today. Okay, so change this to one line by doing like this. And do we ever use. Let's hook this manage team up real quick to the router. So can you go to the app? The router routes and the app routes. And can you add a route on line 15? Oh, okay. I messed up the styling a little bit, but now it's starting to look a little bit deployed, like, cool. You know what I mean? Yeah. Just figure out how to put a BG image inside of this div. You could. You could even add it, like here.
Hey, guys.
What's up?
I heard Minnie.
Yeah.
Hey.
I haven't seen you in a long time.
You know, I was going to say something. It's been forever. Yeah, I know. Happy New Year's, you guys.
How are you?
I'm good. Yeah, it's cold over here, but I'm good. And it's raining.
You got to tell me about cold at least it's raining. It's snowing. Here we. You're almost in Korea, like in two.
Weeks, in three weeks, the word on the street is that you're going to meet Shay at the boxing gym.
Are you scared?
Are you scared?
Why would I be?
That's what he asked me to ask you.
Why would I be scared? Why would I be. How do you know that? Why would I be scared? I would. Dude, please. My prediction after, like 30 seconds. I had an epiphany this morning. Like, I think for the past couple weeks I've been exercising every morning, like doing body weight exercises, like push ups, pull ups. And I found myself like, okay, let's just get through it, you know, rather than really trying to feel like a burn or something. And in the end, I'm just cheating myself. And I just. It reminded me of coding because when you're trying to just like finish a project, you end up with more bugs than you would if you understood. And then when you hit the bug of just trying to finish, copy paste a ChatGPT solution or something, and you don't understand it. You don't know where the bug's happening, you know, or like you outsource something, you know, and then it's just like they say they could get it in fast and you're like, okay, this is good time management. I'll work on something else. But then you get the outsourced stuff, and you're like, fuck, what the fuck did I do? What did I get myself into? And it's like, sometimes it's more worth debugging than just starting. Even if you get less reps, you know, something is better than nothing. So just do it as well as you can. It's all about the progress, not the result.
