Début
It's already mid January, and I still haven't finished my first year in review. I've tried for 3 years now.
In 2020, I tried founding a company called Iris with my friends Kanyes and Sam. Somehow, even two years later, a rush of pride fills my chest every time I think about the work we had done -- it felt so amazing to attempt to solve problems I felt so acutely as a student — I still can't believe we did that. That year, I started to write a year wrapped, inspired by Sam's and Kanyes's, but I never finished it. It was arranged chronologically -- I got from January to May just fine, but never got past June -- right around the time Iris fell apart.
In 2021, I faced the toughest year of my life. To this day, there are only a handful of people who know what happened. I haven't had the courage to share it with most people yet, it’s still something I’m working towards. That year, I didn't even start a year in review.
This year I started my review, and if you're reading this, it means I finished it too. I hope it gives you a raw look into how my year went, and where my life is headed.
Over the many drafts I had written, I’ve consistently had a hard time summarizing this year. In my last semester of college, in a poetry class I took, we read about someone whose life was brutally taken at the age of 14 after being accused of a crime he never committed. The poem presented an alternate reality of him at the grocery store as an old man, of what he would’ve been like, a vision of the future in which he had the privilege to live a boring, ordinary life.
As I think about this year, so much has happened, yet I feel incredibly grateful that much of what happened was ordinary, in the best way. All of the people I care about — my family and friends — are all still with me. I have faced no major health issues or life crises, especially not like the one in 2021. I have a job where I am challenged and that I love going to every day. I’ve gotten many opportunities to spend quality time with the people I care about. Though this year was by no means perfect, everything that I will get into begins with this ultimate gratitude as a foundation.
My year
This year marked one year since I graduated from UC Berkeley. This year I also completed then exceeded my first year working full-time at Matician, and did work that I believe to be at the forefront of computer graphics and robotics — an opportunity I think few individuals get in their lifetime, let alone immediately after graduating. I try to remind myself of this every day.
I worked on 3 technically challenging projects outside work. One of them was (unpaid, then later paid) research with a power electronics group at UC Berkeley, the other two were a project with my friends and a project with a coworker. I went very deep in computer graphics, programming languages, concurrency + complex multithreaded systems, and trigonometry and 3D geometry. I got a strong introduction to newer areas like computer networking, passive electrical components, python in data science applications, and web frameworks like Node, WebRTC, React, and a lot more.
I made my first major open source contribution, as part of the research work I was doing:
https://github.com/kanyesthaker/pgsql-csv-uploader/pull/2
I worked incredibly hard this year. Much harder than I’ve ever worked. Almost every day this year, I reached work at 11am and came home after midnight, usually after 2 or 3 am. I often worked weekends too.
Last December, and bleeding into January, I came back from a 2 week family trip to India. In June, I did another family trip to Sweden and Denmark. In December, I did my first 5-day solo trip to New York to see friends. I brought people together many times, often for brunches and smaller hangouts, but I hosted major events twice, once in February for the Super Bowl, and again in October for Halloween.
I didn’t read as many books as I would have liked, nor was I super consistent about exercising. I spent the first half of this year going to the gym semi-regularly, but then dropped off completely after June. I started running in November, then ran my first 10k, and then stopped running too. I had a hard time eating healthy, nutritious food consistently. I used UberEats way too much.
I started learning French in October, and took it very seriously for the rest of the year. I partnered with my roommate Kanyes to design an apartment that we would enjoy spending time in and could bring people together in. We meal prepped for each other nearly 50 times.
I reached a three year milestone with my wonderful partner, Christina. I added another dimension to each friendship I had before the year started, and went out of my way to spark new friendships with people living both close and far.
My work
Since this is my first wrapped, I feel it’s important to give some context on my life. Even though some of this happened before 2022, it’s plays an important role in the direction my life is going.
Those who know me well know I’m a builder at heart — I’ve spent my whole life falling in love with products that other humans took a lot of time, care, and love to craft. So in my life, I’ve spent a lot of my time learning how it was done, and putting the same time, care, and love into my crafts. In college, I decided I wanted to take it to the next level, so I tried starting my first company, Lumos, which earned my cofounder and I a Y-Combinator interview at 18 years old — then a few projects in between — then my second company which earned my cofounders and I an investment offer of $150k at a $3 million valuation to turn Iris into a real company.
More importantly, it gave us a taste of how we could marry deep design and engineering to create something that could meaningfully help people in their day to day life. We were driven by the desire to build something truly great. Ultimately, after a lot of time, care, and love, both companies ended up failing, and I was forced to confront some difficult realities.
At a particularly low point in November 2020, I reached out to an entrepreneur who I looked up to and whose work I respected, asking for advice. He responded with:
It seems you’ve cut your teeth on many startups and had a lot of failure. That is the same that happened to me early in my career. Then I woke up and decided I really don’t know enough about all the details to build and run a real business. That’s when I decided to go work for my heroes and learned from them. I think that is exactly what you need to do, go find an incredible smart team working on a mission/problems that you are incredibly passionate about. Take whatever job for whatever amount they pay you so you can learn everyday.
After much reflecting, I decided to take his advice very seriously and try something different for a few years. I concluded that by working at a young, hungry, and fast-paced startup, I'd be able to learn the right way to do things.
I’ve realized that I’m not quite fast, tall, or able enough to compete at an elite level in athletic sports. I don’t quite have the talent to be a great entertainer that brings incredible joy into the lives of others. But maybe with enough hard work, discipline, and effort in the right direction, I could eventually help build products that make an important difference in people’s lives. Maybe one day, as important and iconic as the television, the camera, the plane — something that serves as an inflection point in the arc of humanity.
In order to get there, I realized that if I wanted to build great technology products, I first had to become great at technology, which meant learning to become a great engineer.
Matician
I’d like to think that this year, I’ve made large strides in that direction, by completing my first year and then some at my first job which is a small startup of ~50 people called Matician. There, I played a small role and eventually a much bigger one in writing software to help create the foundations of the first truly autonomous robots, which can do repeatable tasks like floor cleaning, etc. in a trustworthy way and give humans their time back.
So much has happened in the last year of working here that it’s difficult to capture into words. I genuinely believe that the team I get to work with at Matician is one of the most talented teams in the world — I’ve been able to work on some really hardcore design and engineering problems, and been lifted by my colleagues to perform at an elite level. I’ve delivered work that touched core domains of software engineering like iOS, computer graphics, networking, and design, and have owned and delivered a large project that our 50 person team has come to rely heavily on every single day. I know there’s still a giant gap between me and the best, and I know it will still take years of hard work before I’m there — but I also see that gap closing faster day by day.
I worked on a lot of projects outside of work this year, and each of them shaped me to an incredible extent — I expand on that a lot below. But it’s important to note that all of the projects combined don’t come close to the amount of lessons I’ve learned at Matician this year. I’m indebted to my mentors who’ve taught me often through their words, and consistently through their example what it means to do great, inspired work.
Research
In January of 2022, it had been 7 months of working full time at Matician, and I had learned a tremendous amount about the world of robotics. But in my senior year of college, I had taken some classes on photovoltaics and semiconductor physics, which ended up leaving a lasting imprint. So I had been looking for ways to get involved with engineers working in sustainable energy in some capacity.
Early last year, I drafted emails to groups at Berkeley that I thought were doing good work, and though it was a bit of an uphill battle, I ended up getting an unpaid, unofficial research position with a group working on power electronics. I worked with a graduate student in the final year of his Ph.D. to do a comprehensive survey of passive components, things like different kinds of capacitors and inductors. The goal was to build a software tool, CompoNet, that let researchers survey component properties (like energy density, etc) to help them create more efficient power converters for use in electric aircrafts and EV batteries.
Over the 8 months I have worked on it, I learned a tremendous amount about passive electrical components, Python + Typescript + PostgreSQL, and the world of academia. We ended up hitting many major milestones by October, my role went from unpaid to paid, and we’re on track to publish a paper and present at a major power electronics conference by March of 2023.
Spacebar
I haven’t shared this with most people, but after I stopped working on Iris, my other two friends ended up working on a few more projects together, called DropTheFax, Ferret, etc. At the time, I was trying to answer a lot of difficult questions in my life — whether to start a company or find a full-time job, where to move, how I wanted to design the next few years of my life. Though I had voluntary taken a step back to answer these questions, I felt bad that I wasn’t working with my friends, doing what I loved most.
So this year, it was a big push for me to work on something with my friends again. In February, there was a distinct moment when we sat around the dinner table of our apartment, brainstorming how to grow in our ability as engineers. We toyed with the idea of working in an area we had no experience in. At some point, we had an idea of building a multiplayer 3D world like Minecraft where you can video chat with friends. None of us came in with experience designing a world in 3D, writing graphics code, working on real-time peer to peer data exchange — we felt as though there was a huge learning opportunity and we decided to do it.
In this project, I had ownership over the backend and networking work. I taught myself Typescript and other surrounding Web technologies, read through a large amount of the MDN Web Docs, and implement parts of real-time video conferencing software from scratch.
Crafting Spacebar was a ton of work, and each of us learned a lot about how to build up a cadence for the project. We started our first weekly sync in September, then did 15 more every Monday evening until the end of the year. Most of the work was asynchronous, but we did three hackathons — two in person and one remotely. We hit our first huge checkpoint in November, and created a second one we’re positioned to hit in February 2023, where we’ll ship a higher quality, working version of the software to the public internet. Beyond the milestones, I’m excited to push Spacebar to solve a genuine problem, first for us three, and eventually for groups of people at large.
Espresso Machine
Later in the year, I decided to build an espresso machine from scratch with a coworker of mine. In the past, I had never attempted to work on a hardware project involving electronics, mostly because I lacked a confidence in my ability to actually be able to learn the electrical, mechanical, firmware, and software skills necessary to do it. But after over a year of seeing how it was done at Matician, around September, I started entertaining the idea of working on a project involving hardware. It was right around that time when Billy asked me if I wanted to build an espresso machine with him.
To be honest, he drives most of the hardware decisions — he’s a mechanical engineer by trade and has also built this before. But I find it exciting to learn years of engineering lessons by working alongside him, and push myself in an area outside of my natural comfort zone. We started working on this only a few months ago, mostly on Sundays — so the project is mostly in its easy stages.
We’ve made some noteworthy progress. We’ve designed a uniquely asymmetric form in 2D and then 3D, and have decided to make it using a fully sustainably through a material called Richlite that’s essentially compressed paper. We’ve taken apart multiple espresso machines to get an idea of their internals, finalized and ordered many of the parts, and created a v1 CAD model of the machine complete will most of the internal components. Besides the work benches at Matician, we’ve worked out of a makerspace called Humanmade in SF to run experiments on the various materials we wanted to test.
We plan to see this through by the end of 2023 — with breakout features like over-the-air software updates, integrated temperature and weight sensors that would give people feedback on their espresso shot, profiles for different people using the machine, and a brutally simple user interface.
French
This is my only non-technical project, and mostly just for fun, but this year I decided to learn French. It started when at some point my Spotify playlists began shifting from an assortment of 20 songs in English to an assortment of 20 songs en Français. There was something really intriguing about the way French rolled off the tongue, and I became increasingly curious to learn it — to the point where it frustrated me that I was listening to 10+ hours of music a day whose lyrics I couldn’t even understand.
It’s been about four months of learning French, but already it’s one of the most rewarding pursuits I’ve taken on. I started mostly by practicing the basics — practicing vocabulary, writing sentences and correcting grammar, and reciting stories of my life out loud to myself during my lunch break at work. In October, I made a penpal friend named Loanne, who’s roughly my age and lives an hour south of Lyon, France. We started calling about once a week — I help her with English and she helps me with French.
This year, I’ve had over 13 conversations in French, read dozens of articles in French, watched two French TV shows, listened to 24 podcast episodes, learned thousands of new vocabulary words, and booked tickets to live in France for a month and a half in 2023. Beyond just learning the language, this hobby gave me an opportunity to make a new overseas friend. After getting to know each other online for three months, in December 2022 when she reached the US, I actually met her in person for the first time and solidified a friendship I hope will last many years to come.
Learning
I wrote earlier that I hadn’t read as much as I would’ve liked this year, but to be honest, I don’t think I even finished a single book cover to cover. The way I’ve thought about learning has changed quite a bit this year.
I’ve shifted a lot more to learning by doing, but it has been hard to measure progress — it’s still something I’m working on figuring out. I know I’ve gotten better — a lot better — but it’s hard to say what I’ve gotten better at holistically, and it’s hard to measure what “a lot” means in a practical sense.
I think the intellectual in me feels dissatisfied with learning only what’s relevant to the task at hand, then moving on, instead of learning the entire breadth of that subject — in contrast to the way we were taught to in school by taking classes that covered a huge breadth of material. I’ve had to keep reminding myself that I’m still learning, just differently.
My life
When I walked into work on the first day after joining Matician, I found a thick 5x10” white cutout titled “Matician Axioms” placed squarely on the center of my desk. Under the title, in bold sans-serif, was: Work hard, work smart, work long. I’d like to think I knew how to work hard. And for many months after I stopped working on Iris, I took a step back and spent time thinking through what direction to push my work in. I’ve interpreted working long to mean working in a way that is sustainable for decades to come. This year, I’ve been extra intentional about learning how to work long.
I made many hard decisions and sacrifices in my life so that I could focus on my goals. I renewed my lease in Mountain View for another year, away from most of my friends who’ve moved to New York City or San Francisco, so that I can be a 4 minute drive from work. I’ve stayed in the office past midnight, and often past 2am almost every single weekday. I’ve dedicated most weekends to work or my other projects. I’ve tried my best to say yes to opportunities to see my friends and spend time with my girlfriend, but I’ve had to say no to countless Thursday evening dinners and weekend hangouts to meet an ambitious deadline I set for myself.
I’ve certainly had moments this year where the sacrifices got to me, where I’ve felt incredibly lonely because I got home hours after my roommate has fallen asleep for a month straight. Or when I see a lot of my friends live much more colorful versions of their twenties living in a big city, traveling to new places, and creating awesome memories with awesome friends.
I know I’m running a marathon, not a sprint, and I’ve barely started mile one. I know that I’m not the type of person that burns out and quits, but I also know first-hand from Lumos and Iris that if I let my family relationships, my friendships, and my health slip, I will quickly become very unhappy. After I was left with a string of broken projects and half baked friendships at the end of college, I learned the hard way that having an orderly life, and placing lots of importance on recovery, is a necessary piece in not falling out of the race.
Keeping Order
I’ve learned to spend at least half of my Sundays getting my life in order. It means meal prepping so we always have a warm home-cooked meal in the evening after work. It means keeping our bathroom spotless, our kitchen shiny, and our towels washed — and maintaining it throughout the week. It’s a small win, but I appreciate coming back to a clean place, it’s something I’ve grown proud to call a home. And it’s an unspoken message I like to say to all my family and friends each time they visit, that everything in my life — my work, my relationship with them, down the smallest detail of my apartment — will be treated with utmost respect and care.
Relationships
I’ve grown closer than ever with my family this year. I think I had a hard time finding the autonomy and growth I needed finishing my senior year of college in my childhood bedroom online during Covid. I think I took a lot of that frustration out on my family, and if they hadn’t been infinitely patient and supportive, I might have really damaged our relationship. This year, I’ve been fortunate to have the necessary space it took to understand who I am, and then understand how much I appreciated their role in helping me become who I am.
I fought hard to be there for my family this year. I tried being there when my sister needed me to be an ear as she figured out challenges of navigating her college roommates, who she had an incredibly hard time adjusting to. I tried being there for my mom as she dealt with the difficult reality of her mother (and my grandma) going through treatment for Stage 3 breast cancer. I’ve tried showing my family that I care for them in the ways I know best, and I’m going to continue fighting to be there for them.
I hit and exceeded 3 year mark with my beautiful girlfriend Christina. I’m incredibly lucky to go through life with her, and she’s been by my side through a lot of life’s toughest moments. I’ve learned so much from our shared experience of building a friendship together, and I’m grateful to have her as my closest confidant.
I also played a role in forming a large group of friends my age who all live in the different parts of the bay, who’ve all gotten closer to each other. And I helped bring them together dozens of times through various occasions throughout the year.
Being there for my friends, and those around me, matters to me a lot. I put in a lot of conscious effort to be someone reliable, someone who leads by example. I’ve certainly gotten better than I was last year, but I still catch myself letting months pass by before checking in with my friends, and frequently writing “sorry for the late response” after prioritizing work over them.
My Values
I try to live my life intentionally through the values I hold. I’ve journaled over 200 times this past year, it’s something I do with Christina each night. We write a list of our values at the top, and a bullet point list of the highlights of the day. Then we put a :), :, or :( next to each of the points based on how well that fit with our values.
Of the many I evaluated myself on, here are four that I took extra seriously this year:
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Stay Consistent
At the end of 2020, I actually asked my best friends to each write out my biggest strengths and weaknesses. One theme I saw over and over again was that I hard time sticking things through to the end. In fact, here’s a direct quote from feedback I had gotten: “100% all in, switch-up, then 100% all in → inconsistent.” This year, I made a commitment to myself that if I said yes to a project, a friend, etc., I would stick with it, past all the sexy and unsexy parts, until I get the job done. I’ve started a lot of projects this year, and I’m proud to have stuck with the really intense commitments that each of them entailed over many months in spite of how tough it got. But the job isn’t finished yet. A huge push for this year will be to actually take my projects, both at work and beyond, to the finish line.
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Communicate Early
I’m not very confrontational. I’ve always found it hard to speak up in my life. It’s still really hard, and there are many things in my life I still haven’t had the courage to open up about. Although I’ve gotten a lot better about giving feedback to people around me and speaking up about something that bothers me, I find myself saying barely a word when I’m in a meeting at work for fear of saying the wrong thing or fear of being judged. There’s a certain freedom that comes with being open, and I’d like to continue making large strides towards that.
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Don't Judge Yourself
I have a deep desire to do important work in my life, and I often set very ambitious goals for myself and push myself relentlessly to get there. On rare occasions, I am surprised by how much I am able to do, and it ends up being far more than I originally thought. However sometimes, I fall short, and I find it’s critical that I don’t judge myself in those moments. I find that the quickest way to burning out is by not giving myself the space to fail, by judging myself when I inevitably do. I still catch myself evaluating my current week based on how I did during my best week, and then feeling like I’m always falling short. But over the past many months, I’ve drilled myself to let go a lot more — it’s fine that I’m not perfect, I don’t need to be.
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Stay Focused Focus to me has meant making choices that remove distractions in my life that prevent me from reaching my goal, which right now is to become a great engineer. In a world in which my peers working in technology do their work from their bedroom at least part of the time, I’ve gone into the office every single day. To me — the focus on being a great engineer comes from working with an open door, from the esprit de corps of sitting next to great engineers, and learning from them day after day after day. It comes from working long hours grappling with hard engineering projects on Friday and Saturday nights instead of going out. It also means taking necessary time away from work when I feel my quality go down, so I can come back refreshed.
Enfin
Thank you for taking the time to read my reflection. With each year that goes by, I find it harder to keep in regular touch with those who have meant a lot to me throughout times in my life. If I missed a special occasion or haven’t reached out in a while, I’m sorry about that, it’s something I’m trying hard to be better about. To each of my friends and family, I just wanted to share a thanks from the bottom of my heart for inspiring me, shaping who I am, being there for me, and unconditionally supporting my passions. This year, and beyond, I will continue fighting hard to make you proud.
"We all started at the same place you're in today. Everyone has their self-doubts, and no one's perfect. And when you meet your heroes and you work with them, and they treat you as a peer, learn from them. Keep moving. If you're dreaming the right dream, you're on the right path. I've been there before. It's tough. Keep going. These people helped me to become the person I am.” — Tony Fadell, General Magic