Hi! I’m Laban, and this is my scratchpad on the Internet.
It’s really not something I expect anyone to read - actually, I’d be surprised if anyone did, barring the occasional business school student doing some quick background research in advance of a coffee chat. (Been there, done that.)
What I’ve noticed about myself is that I’m an “insecure overachiever”. It matters too much to me that what I put out into the world is finished, needing no more revisions, needing no more updates, and ready to be immortalized. But that’s not how anything works: it’s not how I collaborate with my team at work, nor how anybody builds products. So this is a place for me to practice shipping things - unfinished, imperfect, rough-around-the-edges things. Maybe they’ll be serviceable anyways. But if not, and you stumble upon something you find egregious, I do hope you’ll let me know.
If you want to get in touch: hello@labanl.in. Cheers!
My workplace doesn’t use Expensify or any other modern expensing software. As a result, I have to manually enter all my receipt details (e.g., date, type, amounts) into what is basically a spreadsheet app - and it kinda sucks.
I’m - very recently - coming off a six-month externship at Stripe, where I worked on pricing recommendations. Turns out I write a lot (making my poor manager read 10-page recommendations when they’re supposed to be ~5 pages). Thankfully, learning from my time there, I’ll keep this brief.
I made a security¹ solution² that notifies me whenever my condo door is opened while my partner and I are away. It’s great. I really like it. But, for full transparency, it’s really not a security solution because:
My girlfriend and I have an inside joke: once upon a time, she made a remark about becoming a trophy wife, and I thought it would be funny to give her an actual trophy. This made her the (proud) owner of the (coveted) Best Girlfriend 2017 award. Then 2018 came, and I thought - Oh man - what do I get her this year? Maybe I could up the ante by making a trophy for her instead of buying one.
I’ve always wanted a personal website. That there could be a reflection of me—a curated, privacy-conscious version, but a reflection nonetheless—drifting about the internet was a fun thought. It started in high school. To augment my university applications, I put together a small Squarespace website. It had all the fancy frills, like parallax image scrolling and a responsive layout (remember, this was 2013; this counted as somewhat fancy). What I loved the most, however, was the ability of a website to showcase. I didn’t just have to list pilot on my resume; this website could describe how I’d become one, and walk the reader through the hoops I’d jumped through to earn the scholarships that would let me fly. And I could use images too, to really show what I’d done. It didn’t matter to me that most people looking at my resume probably wouldn’t visit my website. I felt that I had done my part in trying to tell my story.
In sophomore year, I led a hackathon called nhacks. It was the first year that Nspire (Canada’s largest student-run business-tech non-profit) was running events of this scale, and I got to lead the one in London, Ontario. To make the hackathon happen, I built a registration platform to handle hacker acceptance, waitlisting, email notifications, as well as sponsor accounts and name tags.