Hey 2024 me,
You’ll be glad to know the tapestry of life you started weaving so intentionally has become rich and full. Where many previous years were marked by tumultousness that threw the year out of whack, this year felt stable and settled. Centered was the word you used last year and I think that still describes this year well.
I’m currently writing this letter from Shenzhen. China has a big firewall which blocks most western internet traffic so most apps just end up bricked. I somewhat purposefully ‘forgot’ to install a VPN and so I’ve been spending pretty much all of my screen time scrolling my photos or looking through my notes.
It’s quite nice having your default Pavlovian response of doomscrolling be replaced with the something that instead makes you stop and relive each memory. I remember being proud after I made that teapot. I wonder where it lives now? I still remember how I felt watching that sunset. G and J were laughting just outside the frame of this photo. I hope that these snapshots I can also pass onto my future children and retell the same feelings. In lieu of children I’ve yet to have, I’ll describe this years tapestry of memory to you instead.
- I did a lot of hiking and backpacking in the outdoors.
- AllTrails said I did something like 170km of hiking this year!
- There were many weekends where G and I drove to Pacifica or Mount Tam to meander through the fog and the trees. So many good conversations happened on those trails and it really made me so grateful for how close nature is to home.
- I started the year with a solo trip to Big Sur. I always forget the silent toils of putting foot after foot and feeling the burning in your legs but it’s this same toil that you learn to love as the distance piles on. There’s nothing quite like making it to your campsite just in time to setup camp during sunset and afterwards eating a nice warm meal with a good book in hand. I remain adamant that a good physical challenge for the body and time out in the woods is one of the best ways to heal the mind and soul.
- I also did Snow Mountain with J where we were almost trapped in a rain storm but luckily escaped over a ridge in the nick of time. I fondly remember being incredibly grateful to find enough dry branches to make a campfire to warm ourselves up (and J’s burnt sock, RIP).
- S and I also did (or rather attempted) Alpha Mountain up in Vancouver. It was my first time turning back to due to a lack of preparedness, we just didn’t end up knowing enough about alpine mountaineering to continue. Maybe 2026 will be our re-attempt :)
- I read a lot of great books this year.
- Crime and Punishment I mostly picked up on a whim walking into a bookstore after listening to a few podcast episodes on some of Dostoevsky’s works and it took me a few months of on-and-off reading to finish it. It really surprised me with its depth and portrayal of a man’s slow descent into madness. I also think it covered the moral weight of guilt, and redemption and forgiveness really well and was maybe the first ‘classic’ I read where I really felt like I understood why it was a classic.
- I also read Stay True on my solo trip to Big Sur. It was recommended by someone I was dating at the time near the tail end of the time we spent together. This has become my favourite memoir and has many parts I come back to often about friendship, memory, and time, topics which people close to me know I love to weave into many a conversation.
- I did a lot of my reading over a small number of concentrated days where I just sat down and reading was the main activity of that day. I think that meshes a lot better with how I approach doing things broadly more than just sitting and reading at the end of each day. I’m going to try to get more days in my schedule where I just go to a library and read :)
- G and I acquired outdoor crashpads this year and we got some good use out of them.
- We’ve done a few small trips to Indian Rock and Castle Rock and though my outdoor climbing grade is still four to five grades below my indoor project grade, I still thoroughly enjoy just touching real rock. It totally feels like a different sport altogether. Micro-beta feels incredibly important; the difference in a few millimeters of few placement makes or breaks a climb and you can’t just power through climbs the same way you can indoors.
- There’s this one V2/3 project I finally sent after 2 sessions in Castle Rock called The Beak Traverse which has a really fun sequence of moves that ends with a large span-y move and a hard mantle. I think sending that boulder was the first time I audibly celebrated after sending a project. I like that it feels like you can ‘learn’ a rock.
- We hosted our 71st and final Playspace in May.
- We (the cohosts) also wrote a letter to the community. I encourage you to read it if you’re curious about why we decided to call the finale where we did.
- It sucks to decide to end something. Especially something that was the start of so so many beginnings for myself and all the cohosts. It’s how I met my closest friends in the city and picked up guitar. The decision was not made in one night either. G and I sat over many a cup of tea reminiscing about what it meant to us, what we would do afterwards, and all the connections that wouldn’t be made because Playspace no longer exists.
- It was the right decision at the time. I don’t feel like I’m in a particularly social period of my life right now and I’m content with the balance of time alone right now but I do suspect that sometime in 2026 the pendulum of introversion/extroversion will swing in the other direction again and something Playspace-shaped will emerge once more.
- 2025 was also a big year for work.
- I don’t talk about work a lot but it honestly makes up so much of my days. I like it a lot still. It’s a wealth of fun technical challenges and I love working with my team. I get to deep-dive on niche bugs and technical prototypes which are maybe the two things that sit at the intersection of things I am good at and things I absolutely love doing.
- I also led a lot of fun engineering projects that I’m in the middle of writing blog posts on right now but the tldr;
- Creating the template for the Agent to create fullstack JS/TS apps.
- Notebook and browser infrastructure for autonomous self-testing in the Agent.
- Fixed some nasty data races deep in our pseudoterminal library.
- Designing, building and deploying our own time-travel Postgres database for Agent apps.
- I became my team’s tech lead which means a lot more of my time is now spent doing mentorship, code review, and technical design review. It’s a very different way to spend time and I definitely still prefer technical prototyping but it’s honestly really fun to upskill others and watch them grow. I am happy that my team trusts me to do this role well.
- There is still so much to learn and do! Something something eternal student’s mindset. I think I am still learning when to be loud and advocate for my own ideas and also how to split time between unblocking/upskilling others versus actual engineering tasks but that feels like it comes with time.
- G and I also picked up Pump It Up (a Dance Dance Revolution adjacent game) on a whim.
- I used to play a lot of rhythm games like Etterna and 4k osu! Mania and really thought there would be more skill transfer… but it has proven a lot more difficult to go from using fingers to using feet. It does, however, mean that G also started roughly at the same skill level and it’s been incredibly nice to pick up a new hobby alongside someone and to have that friendly, competitive rivalry. We started around S4-S5 in difficulty and originally wanted to reach S10 by end of year (which is what the game considers ‘intermediate’ in skill) and just two weeks ago we were able to both pass S13 at a AAA grade :’) Stretch goal to hit S18 by end of 2026…
- It’s become a small ritual to text “ddr 👀” and shortly be on the 280 down to Round1. We’ll play for 2 hours until we’re both sweaty and get udon afterwards. Some of the better players recognize us and say hi and give us tips too. Routine is good, it feels incredibly nice to come back week after week and feel your body and brain grok something.
- Pottery continues.
- I was very lucky to have gotten the chance to booth at a few fairs this year, namely West Coast Craft with A, CCA Student Fair with K and G, and Tori’s thanks to R. It is a strange thing to offer your work up to be judged by the masses. In any given day at a fair, maybe a few hundred people will walk by the pieces you’ve spent dozens if not hundreds of hours on and out of those hundred, about fifteen will glance at it, five will stop to take a look, and less than one will engage in conversation about your work and purchase something. It’s a good practice in detaching your self-worth from your work but at the end of the day it still feels like it sucks the marrow out of your bones. I think the next time I do a craft fair will be after I have a lot of pieces leftover from just sheer volume of practice that I need to get rid of to get storage space back.
- I did my first soda firing this year! As a technique, I really love the colors and effects it produces and just how environmentally dependent and delicate the whole process is. Small changes in the atmospheric pressure, humidity, soda ash content, pot placement, and wood schedule create huge variations in how the pieces come out. It almost feels like prayer when we unseal the kiln and hold our collective breaths for what we left in some higher being’s hands.
- I want to also shoutout T, M, C, and E for their warm welcome and guidance at the firing. It really felt like everyone there was in the business of celebrating pottery for the act of making and sharing that craft with each other. Some of my pieces slumped this time around because the porcelain I normally throw with (550 Porcelain) is rated for cone 10 but the soda firing itself goes up to cone 13. C recommended this more expensive porcelain for soda firing so I bought some in the hopes of doing one more firing this year :)
- I feel a very strong urge these days to go hide away and do a pottery apprenticeship in some country I’ve never been to. The last 3 months I have been trying to refine the proprioception of my arms as I pull up larger pieces where I can’t see my inside hand. I find that anything more than 3lbs, the walls become tall enough that I can no longer couple my hands and pull it up together. Instead, I must rely on my body to keep both hands floating but married as I make my pulls. I currently just don’t know what the right bodily feedback I should be paying attention to in my hands as I make these pulls but I’m sure it comes with practice as all things do. My goal is to get to a 15in cylinder of about 4in in diameter with 5lb of porcelain. Currently, I am at about 11in.
- I went to my first few weddings this year!
- Wow I love love. Shoutout J&M and A&H. Weddings are amazing, you get to gather all your close friends and loved ones and make them do silly things like make art, fly to Utah, dance, and tell stories about how you met. You get to see your friends cry happy tears!
- It is incredibly moving to see how various people in their lives retell stories of the happy couple at different points in time. What an honor it is to be seen at so many points in your life that you can piece together a story of change. “The ultimate touchstone [of friendship]” as David Whyte wrote, “is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them, and to have believed in them, and sometimes, just to have accompanied them, for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
- Here’s to taking steps to meet my wife in 2026 :)
In previous years, the end of these reflections ends with goals for the new years. Most often they are aspirations and values rather than specific goals which I think has been a healthy pattern to shape and direct but not constrain my year. It gives you a direction in which to try.
To quote Annie Dillard again:
“There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle. Effort alone I loved. Some days I would have been happy to push a pole around a threshing floor like an ox, for the pleasure of moving the heavy stone and watching my knees rise in turn.” (Annie Dillard, An American Childhood)
Link to original
So some direction for 2026:
- Keep up the routines that give life its structure, do the things you said you would. Climb twice a week, show up at the pottery studio twice a week, go on two hikes a month. Show up to the things your lovely friends host.
- I’d like to exercise my writing muscle again. I ache for the days when translating ideas from the mind to the page felt smooth and almost freeing. Writing this piece had the starts and stops of someone learning to drive manual transmission for the first time. Maybe a good thing to do in a communal way on a recurring basis? Try to publish four pieces you are happy with.
- I’d like to become a morning person. I failed doing that last year mostly because my sleep schedule became weird after coming home from work late all the time. I’d like to be in bed by 12 and up at 7. Make breakfast and some tea every morning.
- Take proper time off. A full week at least where you can hand work off and just not check Slack. Be bored, it’s good for the mind.
History is made by those who show up! Keep showing up :)
Kindly,
Your present self