Every now and then, I’m reminded about how lucky my life has been thus far - I have a great family, got lucky with my career trajectory (so far at least), have an amazing partner to share life with - and my recent vacation to China was one of those moments.

This vacation is actually the longest one I’ve been on since I’ve started work 4 years ago - a whole 3 weeks - Wednesday to Tuesday to take advantage of cheap plane tickets, and as a result I’m sitting at home, just barely made it to the weekend after being back to work for a few days, with a severe case of the vacation blues.

It’s been three Februaries since I started working at Facebook, and I feel like every time around this time of the year, work always accelerates to an almost unsustainable pace and becomes the new normal, never slowing down. The first year, it was releasing our next generation haystack to important AI customers. The next, a bunch of data loss sevs and reports kept me incredibly busy. This year, I get put on a high priority org level project because another senior person left.

When I went back to Vancouver for Christmas, I intended to rely on my company phone’s free roaming data when I was around, but a few hours after crossing the border, I racked up a 500$ Verizon bill tabbed to Facebook, and Verizon completely refused to offer me more service. And I also left my car with Grace in United States. So I was slated to spend hours on public transit with nothing more than a sleek black brick to keep me entertained.

It’s Dec 31st 2023. Amongst my parents’ many WeChat groups that I’m a part of, everyone’s been passing on an assortment of eloquent blessings written by other people, which seems curious to me as a canada-raised person, since sending copy-pastes doesn’t really convey any sincerity. But I guess if I think about it a bit more, it’s kind of like a middle ground between what I’d do with my friend group - either send a well-written holiday card, or just a simple happy new years gif over messenger.

The cyber-truck recently dropped at our local mall and drew a crowd, and after having just finished this video by MKBHD, I’m left with some negative thoughts that I wanted to get down.

I just want to preface this by saying I’m not a blind Tesla hater. I cold-emailed them back in 2018 begging them to hire me as an intern, fanboying over Elon and SpaceX and electric cars. I watched the cybertruck and model y viewing live with my tesla coworkers like it was some exciting sporting event. Even now, I continuously pester my partner about buying a tesla, a vain attempt at convincing her we need a new car.

Managing my money is so weird. It is literally just a number - somewhere out there, some electrical signals on a rack of RAM on some server somewhere in the world determines what kind of house I live in, what kind of car I drive to work, to some extend my kid’s upbringing. And I work hard every day, with the intention that those signals maybe move over a few bits such that my life is better.

I recently came back from a family roadtrip to Yellowstone. I remember being completely sick of sitting in a car for a Vancovuer -> San Diego road trip my family did in high school, but this one only involved one 11-hour driving, where I alternated with my dad, and did not feel as painful. I think one thing we still need to do better that I feel is part of the soul of road tripping is the spontaneous aspect of being able to stop wherever you’d like, but overall, this trip was a lot of fun.

[TODO add some pictures]

1. Bandera Mountain amazing hike. first half up to the fork between bandera mountain and mason lake (? was that what it was called? it’s been a while) is pretty standard, but then afterwards it starts getting steeper to the point where you need to go on all fours to continue climbing. We were hiking through the clouds too, and there were blooming bear grass flowers that lined the trail, making it feel extra magical. For some reason, it reminded me of howl’s moving castle. One moment you’re hiking through the clouds, and the next you’ve climbed above them and it’s a clear blue sky with mt rainier poking above a fluffy white ocean in the distance. amazing view. one of my best days in the seattle area. we tried to get to big bandera but the trail was too hard to follow, and we kept making wrong turns. grace called it off, with the deal that after we get legit hiking shoes (which we now have!) we would retrace our steps.

For some reason, particularly in the past half year, it feels like time has been slowly speeding up, like skateboarding down a gradual hill, slowly at first, but then faster and faster until now its at a pace where I can barely keep in balance.

At the start of the year, I worked on a few direcitonal things at work, which involved writing design documents and leading sync-ups, something that was completely new and foreign to me and took up a lot of my energy. And then there was a period of crazy production work issues - data losses, critical reliability issues, dead locks - that had me feeling like a post-mortem technical writer rather than an engineer. And now, before both vacations to SF and Yellowstone, I quite literally scrambling and pushing code to meet a self-imposed deadline before I pack my bags and head off on a plane.

This was a post that I had written a while back, that I never got around to posting on instagram because I couldn’t bring myself to wrestle with the text processing user experience for the Nth time… it’s about how cooking became a bit of a drag ever since I started work, and some thoughts on how I can make it better.

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In the current audiobook that I’m listening to, it suggests that one’s identity is nothing more than the culmination of one’s habits, which makes sense if I think about it. During covid, I tried to cook a new dish every week based on what me or grace was craving and ended up with a lot of experience and knowledge that I apply in my every day cooking.