2024.H1 Review

Date: 2024-07-13 | reflect | reflections | review |

We are already halfway through 2024! The older I get the faster the years seem to fly by.

I turned 30 this year which I honestly thought would be a big deal to me leading to some heavy existential angst. But really it just feels like another year.

I think this is for many reasons:

I reflect regularly
Year to year changes are often incremental
Many of my friends have already turned 30 which gave ample time to consider this milestone myself

I thought this angst would lead to some profound thoughts on life but here I am writing this and it feels like a normal Saturday. So instead I'll link you to Sam Altman's 30th reflection which I still find thought-provoking every time I read it.

High: I'm chilling (Happiness)
Low: Not chilling enough (Business)
Seed: Plans to chill more (Tech)

Observe

High: Lots of research and fulfilling contumption this year
Low: It still feels like a fight to have calm, easy adventures in NYC
Seed: Prioritizing calm, fulfilling hangs and adventures

Overall I'm enjoying slower more chill adventures and hangouts these days. NYC does not make that super easy - it is busy, crowded, and there's little space for finding calm.

I now feel like a 7th year senior in NYC. It was fun for awhile but now I've overstayed and am ready to make a change. Does that mean moving out of NYC? Perhaps. Or we might just move to a new neighborhood that is a bit calmer and gives us a bit more space (I want an office with an AC and window).

Create

High: Shares have gone remarkably well this year
Low: Haven't been as excited ab building as I'd like
Seed: Plans for interesting Creations on the horizon

I love creating things. It's really at the core of what brings me satisfaction. Ali Abdaal's Feel Good Productivity (affiliate) labels this as a Creator Play Personality which I think is a pretty good description.

I've had a lot of angst about this over the years because it seems weird.

I don't know many people like this - they see what I do as "work" not play
Those who are like this tend to be into more common pursuits - music, sports, writing, etc
It's unclear if it's "worth it" - lots of work with few quantitative returns

So I've regularly wondered if this really was what I wanted to build my life around. It was different from how other people built their lives so it was unclear if this would lead to happiness or if I'd find out in 10 years it was all just me tricking myself into working more for a nebulous wish of status / productivity / accomplishment.

I still don't know that answer - and likely never will - but as I've gotten older and more boring I've realized that it doesn't really matter. I enjoy the cycles I have now and that's enough - this is life.

Moreover I've realized that the pursuits and interests I have are not so weird after all. Yes very few people have the exact interests I have (like building stupid little websites in a programming language rumored to be used by ~12 people globally). But many people do find their ways to calm hobbies which become large, sustained sources of satisfaction and fulfillment for the rest of their lives.

More common versions of this path are:

Gardening / farming
Arts and Crafts (knitting / crocheting / painting)
Writing

I of course like to write. But I now think of my Creations more like gardening. Yes I undertake them in the course of some outcome but largely it's the process I enjoy so much that keeps me coming back cycle to cycle and season to season.

So I suppose it's true - in the end everyone wants to return to the land and be a farmer. My crop just happens to be stupid little websites.

Business

High: Generally happy with my job - I am doing good work on interesting problems and building good systems along the way
Low: Mandatory Return To Office in an open-office floor plan is not my favorite
Seed: Finding a balance for doing good work in the way I like doing it

I've now been at Rippling (an HR scaleup) for about one year. The domain poses interesting new challenges compared to what I worked on at Instagram. HR has much less load and thus much less scalability concerns as a planetscale consumer app but the domain rules (necessary complexity) are also much more complex so this has forced me to explore different kinds of system designs which has been interesting.

I'm now at a place in my life where I am more focused on doing good work the way I like to than climbing any ladders - I am a system farmer after all. Overall this has made work more satisfying to me - I am increasing the quality of the systems I build while lowering stress / anxiety I used to feel from career discussions.

One thing I've discovered is that I'm pretty against Return to Office mandates as a general rule. I think they can be done well but overwhelmingly are not. Rippling is one of the many companies that has instituted RTO and, like many others, I believe has done it suboptimally.

Rippling's in-office policy is:

3 days a week in office
Must be M/T/R
If you miss one of those days you must get an exception from your manager AND do a make up day
You get 4 weeks a year where you can come in < 3 days a week
If you are out of compliance you are no longer eligible for raises, promotions, or any review over Meets Expectations and if it stays that way additional penalties may be enacted

I think a lot of people like offices and I understand how blanket rules without exceptions often are better than nuanced rules because they're simpler and over a large enough population often win out.

But I am a fickle human and I like exceptions. I am an introvert with many focus issues so being in a place with lots of humans for many hours is my kind of hell. There's a reason I prefer my home office to coffee shops for getting work done and yet many offices are a worse kind of coffee shop.

All this to say that I don't like the current RTO polices, have decided not complying is better for me overall, and am getting penalized accordingly. This is fair as it follows the rules they laid out but I think the rules are dumb and think they should be changed.

To be clear my problem is not with offices in general but more with inflexible policies requiring you to go into suboptimal offices.

My definition of a suboptimal office is loosely:

Open floor offices - Dozens of people in an open space esp when there are no dividers (visual / audio)
Hot desks only - Meaning you get a standard inconfigurable setup for everything which is almost always not how you do your best work. Usually has a standard, not nice monitor, keyboard, and mouse so you both get a bad setup and can't make it better cause can't customize it.
Teams not sitting together - RTO is often touted as a way to increase collaboration but 90% of the time you are in hot desks sitting next to strangers and never see your team. When you do see your team it might be for lunch or in a meeting. Yet meeting rooms are often hard to come by in these environments because so many people hog them to try and escape the suboptimal open floor plan. Leading to teams actually not collaborating more than if they were remote.

So yeah I think RTO is dumb in its current form. It can be done well but mostly isn't. I expect this trend to last a few years at least while the leaders putting this in place either figure out how to do it better or roll it back.

Of course this is assuming that these decisions are based on data and the welfare / productivity of the workforce but honestly it could be driven by other forces like financial kickbacks (taxes / banks etc) and what looks good on paper (look we did a thing! Big space! So many headcount!) in which case we're all doomed into mediocre working conditions.

Anywho I like WFH / good offices so this will be smth I put more weight into for future positions.

Tech

High: I'm building some stupid little webites!
Low: I was feeling !excited cause trying to make "useful" things but those aren't fun
Seed: Really enjoying my tech stack and plan to build more stupid things while remembering to enjoy the process

When I quit my job last year and tried to be an entrepreneur I realized that building businesses was not something that brought me joy. Really I like to build little systems as a way to play with new ideas and share them with others.

This year I built several little systems and have had a much better time in the process. But still I found myself hung up on creating something "useful" that could make money for a few months and that was less fun. Eventually I realized I was being dumb and falling into the same trap that caused me to be unhappy with my creations last year but it seems like a lesson I'll be continually re-learning.

That said I've been very happy with the little systems I've built - learning new technologies, playing with new techniques, and using a tech stack I feel very good about. I don't know where these Creations will lead if anywhere but I'm having a good time growing them.

Creations this year:

TravelMap - Visualize your travels on a map.
FullstackProjects - 1000s of fullstack project ideas to get your creative juices coding
1000 Checkboxes - A grid of 1000 checkboxes that are synced globally in real-time

You can see all my projects on my Projects Page

Going forward I'm going to try to stress less and enjoy the process more - building whatever seems interesting at the time and sharing it out. I think that's what I want to do long-term.

High: Found a Cycle that works well for me and gets decent results
Low: Feeling a little bored with some of my Shares, largely because I wasn't creating any interesting Tech I was excited to share ab
Seed: Shorter, more frequent shares have been more fun for me to make

Stats:

Posts: ~60

Health

High: Genuinely enjoy my morning workouts
Low: Getting a bit stiff and old
Seed: New exercise pattern focusing on cardio and stretchiness is promising

Last year I started doing morning workouts and this year I've continued to refine them to fit my new life cycles. I absolutely love them - I look forward to them in the mornings, I plan for them in the evenings, and they genuinely make my days better overall wrt mood, energy, and focus.

I no longer run and sit in my office chair even more than I used to so I've been tweaking my workouts to increase cardio and stretching to make this work long-term. So far the results have been promising so am excited to see how this works in a few months.

How I plan my day as a Senior Software Engineer - A Simple Scalable System for getting the most important thing done every day

Finance

High: I have a job! I am saving money!
Low: I still want more money!
Seed: I've been deploying money to invest in things I find fulfilling like visiting family, improving regular cycles, and avoiding things I don't like. More to come.

Finance has long been a core concern of mine. Not because I like money (tho ofc I do) but because I think money can severely limit you if not managed well. So I like to proactively manage it so it doesn't become a limiting factor on my life.

Looking back I think I worried too much about it in my 20s. This is ofc a very privileged thing to say and I'm lucky that I did worry about it so much for all those years as it's probably what got me to where I am today such that I don't have to worry about it as much. But still I think my relationship with money in my 20s caused more anxiety than it did happiness.

These days my relationship with money is a bit more chill. I manage it regularly but I try not to fuss over the details. I have it in a solid, long-term holding pattern with a history of success so now I don't check it every day - just periodic checks to course correct then leave it to do its work.

This has freed me up to spend a little more on the things that value to me. This in turn has allowed me to move closer to my "Rich Life" as Ramit Sethi coins it - living the life you want now while also planning for long-term success.

This is in keeping with a lot of my other domain shifts this year towards a chiller existence today that I can also sustain long-term. In many ways I think this is closer to what peace is - worrying less about the past and future and instead optimizing for the present moment such that each future moment improves as well.

Happiness

High: I am quite happy.
Low: I still stress myself out sometimes.
Seed: I am more content to be myself and live my values which I think will lead to more sustained happiness long-term.

I believe nothing really matters so you might as well be happy. At the same time I think I internally held a belief that happiness (more contentment) led to stagnation - that simply being content with your station and enjoying your cycles while not moving to improve anything was just another word for stagnation.

Now I think my views are less hostile and aggressive. I think it's perfectly okay to build a calm cycle for yourself and live your life in it. As long as you are actually happy with it and it fits your values then you do you - you're living a life true to yourself.

Now personally I do not think I could live a life without growth because it does not fit my values. That's okay too. But my views on what growth is has changed. It's not growing wrt external measures of achievement but more in terms of internal values and potential.

Am I living my values?
Am I putting in good effort? (effort is never the goal but if you're gonna do smth might as well do it right)
Am I enjoying the process?

When I think about my recent shifts in values and actions I think largely it's due to this change of incentives. I am less driven by an external ladder and more by an internal ladder of whether I'm meeting my own expectations around my own potential for living my values.

Overall I think this is a good shift - I am the ultimate judge of myself. But I do foresee some friction where these incentives and resulting actions differ from that of the accepted external ladders.

I suppose we'll cross (or burn) those bridges when we get there.

Nothing big planned just more of the same - doing what I enjoy and hanging around doing things.

Peace.

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