August 2025: Leaving Macau & slow growth - Bryan's Briefing
August 2025: Leaving Macau & slow growth - Bryan's Briefing
Hey friend,
it's been another month and my time in Macau is over! Also, only 4 more issues of this newsletter left until 2026!
Macau has been interesting. I originally tried to look for an internship to get money. I'm looking to earn enough to first survive, and secondly, to be able to finance doing my masters in Korea. I'm managing the first point, mostly, but for the second I need to make some bigger changes. I didn't want to stay in Germany and go through the depression that comes with working in an office job that you don't enjoy. It just hit me how old I am now, next month I turn 24, I'll be closer to 30 than I am to 18, and I especially didn't want to feel like I am wasting my life away.
So I looked for opportunities to work abroad. And I didn't succeed in finding anything through traditional means, neither in the UK nor in Asia. What I did find was the internship in Macau for two months through the IAESTE program. But the pay was very bad, so I dismissed one of my main reasons for going and instead focused on using this opportunity to experience new places. I got at least a little bit of money, around 800€ for working two months at the University of Macau and another ~800€ as a scholarship from the German government.
I wrote a blog post about my time in Macau.
I also have been posting Instagram stories about it.
So overall I definitely have zero regrets in going here, although the many cockroaches and crazy weather were some strong culture shocks.
Now I'm spending my last few days in Shenzhen before I go to Korea again. So thoughts about what to do next are filling my head more than ever. Have some frustrations that I didn't make enough progress in a lot of areas of my life:
- my Korean is not improving fast enough, a main problem is that I just don't work enough on it.
- not enough progress with DailySelfTrack, wanted to publish it multiple months ago.
- I wanted to create more social media and video content about my time in Macau, haven't worked on that in a long time now.
I wasn't even sure whether I would even go back to Korea this quickly, since I could go anywhere now. But I have some doctor appointments in Korea lined up due to health problems of mine.
But overall I'm optimistic and very happy about my current situation, for September I can live in my most favorite area again and work on projects that I care about. Working as a freelance (web) app developer also might bring some income this year.
I'm also happy to have been included in this month's Astro's update post. Especially cool since I'm writing about things I actually care about and use. It's nice to see that the content I create is not entering a black hole of nothingness.
🌱 Cool Content I Made
I was able to focus more on my blog this month.
- https://bryanhogan.com/blog/living-in-macau - About living in Macau, my experience of the past two months.
- https://bryanhogan.com/blog/dangers-of-ai - AI is very cool and makes building digital products much faster, but at the same time it's killing the internet.
- https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-website - How to make a website using Obsidian.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1muizn8/bases_have_a_learning_curve_to_them_but_they_are/ - Obsidian published its new feature Bases, and they are amazing! This also led me to post on the Obsidian subreddit and gain 123k views, and one new subscriber to this newsletter! (👋 Hi! )
- https://bryanhogan.com/now - Updated my now page as well.
❤️ Cool Stuff By Others
📝 Blog Posts
- Why Claude Code is helpful by vivek
- Good software deserves your money by Steph Ango
- Notes on managing ADHD by Fernando Borretti
- No Clicks, No Content: The Unsustainable Future of AI Search by Brad Touesnard - Read this post after I had already posted and updated my post on risks of AI.
- On Emma Goto's writing process by Emma Goto
- On getting your first customer when building a micro SAAS by Marc Lou