Début
I saw him appear out of the gate labeled Air France into Terminal 3 of SFO in his washed out sky blue jeans, and the loose french vanilla half-sleeve a bit too large for his frame. He sifted his way towards the black belt of the baggage claim. He watched impatiently as the luggage tumbled out, before eventually grabbing a navy carry-on with the highlighter orange ribbon, and he walked towards the exit. If there was pride or triumph in his heart, his face didn’t hint it. Rather there was a glint of hunger, a grim determination in his step as he walked towards the exit, unsmiling. A year ago, I would’ve seen a grin on his face beneath the signature streak of Vaseline, especially after such an experience. Today, the curl of his lips is gone, weighed down by the duty he feels towards those in his life, and beyond, to rise to his full potential. Without wasting a second, he disappeared into his roommate’s, and friend’s, handed-down Honda Civic, and soldiered on in his life back in Mountain View.
I feel it. The immense sense of urgency to control my own destiny. To make changes in my life that move me further in the direction of my pursuit towards great work. My own work.
I know it takes a lifetime to craft the kind of work that I will be remembered for, but the last thing I want is to look back and say I was too slow to act, either because I was scared or because I didn’t think I could do it. The best way to know the answer is to just do it and see.
In college, I had often veered off the well-worn path by omitting internships to pursue the thrill of building half-baked ideas with friends during gap semesters, but in November of 2020, I created a plan to give myself until 25, to learn as intensely as possible from mentors 15 years ahead in their careers. To build out a strong set of fundamental skills to arm myself with competence. And then to go for it.
Throughout this year, I’ve heard the ticks of that clock click louder and louder, and I don’t have time to waste. Each year my sense of responsibility grows deeper — to stand tall, courageous, as a son, friend, brother, partner — to make something substantive of my life. I don’t want to waste the sacrifice my kin before me made so that I could have an honest shot.
I’ve resolved to myself that before the ringing bells of next year’s Christmas carols, I will have taken the leap into the next stage of my journey.
My life
This year, I taught myself, and practiced a lot of French, then solo-travelled to France where I spent over two months living with a family of 5 who spoke almost no English. I changed roles in my work from being a solo contributor on a core part of the company which I spent almost two years building from scratch, then onboarded three other people to work on it and learned to drive the team forward, then again switched into a role where I was a beginner starting from scratch. I gained a further set of core skills across computer science — went deeper into graphics & computer vision, and learned a lot about cameras. I spent time in a maker-space in San Francisco called Humanmade, where I learned to use CNC routers, to machine blocks of Richlite into an espresso machine. I held myself to an incredibly high standard in my personal project that I’m building with my closest friends, and barreled forward in the research I’m doing at Berkeley. I cultivated incredible friendships with people from all walks of life 9000km away, while slowly my friends in the bay decided to move away to places like New York, Seattle, and I came back home to a place that felt more foreign than France. I started the year in a writer’s one-bedroom in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and ended it at a friend’s sky-rise in the financial district of Manhattan.
I did a lot this year. While last year, I had the benefit of hustling towards exciting opportunities and started new work, nearly all of this year has about learning the discipline and hard work of taking it to the finish line. I’m not working on anything new this year. Rather, I’m trying to demonstrate to myself, and to those working with me, that I can break past the barrier that brings something from good to great.
Why did I make the decisions I made? In the macro, I have a deep desire to lead a life of adventure and contribution. I’m fundamentally driven by curiosity, and while I don’t think that I’m quite talented enough to direct incredible films or score the championship-winning shot before the buzzer, I think that if I dedicate my life to learning a lot about design and technology, maybe one day I can create iconic products that vastly improve the lives of my fellow humans. In the micro, it means I wanted to spent a lot of time creating really hard things and pushing myself to be bold in the risks I take.
In essence, I wanted this year to be remarkable.
My Work
As I read through my reflection last year, I tried to place myself in the headspace I was in. Last year I started a lot of new things — learning French, working on Spacebar, building an espresso machine, and pursuing research more seriously. At the time, I experienced the great excitement that comes with the open possibilities and infinite futures that each of these can thrown me in. That excitement definitely comes through in my tone.
This year, I’ve tried to keep up the excitement about each of these projects, but I’m not sure I feel it anymore. I’m not sure if I feel anything. For better or worse, I’ve noticed myself becoming increasingly mechanical, and ironically robotic, just like the machines I spent a great deal of my last three years building. Excited or not, I just want to move forward and get shit done.
In many ways, it’s moved me further along in my growth and learning, but taking a toll on my overall happiness. I can’t remember the last time I woke up absolutely thrilled to go to work. Exciting moments this year washed past me, and I remained stoic through them — grimly considering what it would take to get the next thing done, and the next. I see myself on an astronomic trajectory, unable to take it all in because I haven’t built a habit of celebrating the process of doing honest work.
When I read Mamba Mentality, I was most surprised by just how much time Kobe spent in recovery — perhaps because that was the most neglected area in my own practice. For reasons external to me, like what I’m working on, and internal, my own failure to compartmentalize my life, I’ve uncovered a lot of what went wrong in later sections of my reflection. And plan to make it an extra active area of focus in the coming year.
Happy people are enthusiastic, and enthusiasm brings energy, which is critical when you’re the man in the arena, crusading to solve the hardest problems in the world.
Matic
The company I’ve spent the last two+ years at changed its name to Matic, and I changed my roles. Many times. The last two years, I built out Matic’s app, then later shifted to writing the entire graphics engine that exposed all of the robot’s “intelligence” to the user through a live 3D map of their home. I was a one-man army until earlier this year, when I learned to onboard and lead a team of me + one other developer. I worked remotely while I was in France, but as the company scaled and demands for features and stability grew faster than our resources, I found myself returning to Mountain View in the middle of a giant mess that I hadn’t created, of half-implemented features and barely-working code, a mess that I spent the next two months fighting hard to clean up. It was my toughest few months, and it really sucked. Ultimately it was important for me to do in order to do right by the company I helped build and cultivate better long-term relationships with the mentors who’ve consistently believed I could solve hard problems. Even when I didn’t believe I could.
Since that point about 6 months ago, I’ve stepped into a leadership role for the areas I spent time mastering, and drove a team of two other developers. I always knew that as I scaled up in my work, I would need to spend a portion of my time helping others so they can scale up in their work. For the first two years, I actively avoided doing managerial work, partly because I wanted to spend that time mastering my craft as an individual, and partly because I didn’t think I was nearly as experienced as any of the other folks in the leadership roles. They were my peers, sure, but also mentors, and I had learned so much from working with them — at my current stage, I didn’t really see myself playing that role for others. But over the past two years, I had earned more context in certain areas than any other people at the company, so when we hired more engineers to work on those areas, I had to step up. I’ve spent about 30% of my time since mentoring the team, interviewing candidates, and putting together plans and timelines to move projects forward.
The other 70% percent of my focus has still been to learn hard engineering. I’ve worked on many parts of the stack, nearly all of which have been out of my comfort zone. I’ve worked on our mapping algorithm, experimented with cutting-edge photogrammetry techniques like gaussian splatting, built out a software digital signal processor for our camera module, set up the CI servers for running our company’s tests.
Overall, I’m incredibly grateful to have worked at Matic, it’s shaped a core part of my identity as I was finding my place as an engineer. Two and a half years ago, I joined because I wanted to work with great engineers so I could become one myself; I wanted to learn how a business is built by watching a startup grow from seed stage to having revenue and customers lining up outside the door; and I wanted to cultivate a strong network of peers and lifelong relationships with mentors. Looking back, I feel lucky to have gotten out of this what I set out to get — with the scarily low odds that startups succeed, I believe the opportunity I’ve gotten is a truly singular one, and I don’t take it lightly.
I’ve also had to make peace with a some difficult realizations this year. Amongst those I work with, those I respect and seek to learn from most are Braveheart passionate about Matic, and they have thirty-year timelines about scaling it and taking the world by storm. I’ve often felt so bad about not feeling that same sense of passion, and realized it’s a success barrier for me, preventing me from really scaling up to their level of contribution. It sounds obvious in retrospect, but it took me a while to learn that it’s hard for me to love someone else’s baby like my own — as misguided and naive as Iris and Lumos were, I’ve never been able to replicate the same kind of passion at Matic, even though I’ve tried, and tried harder.
I’ve also learned that unless I’m the one driving, I don’t have a lot of control in creating an overlap between the work I’m doing, and the work I want to do. It took me two years to switch out of my old role, and many months later, I still haven’t properly switched into my new one. Sometimes, there are things that just need to get done, and I’m the right person to do it, even if it’s not exactly what I want. That’s always going to happen, but when I’m the one driving, I find that I can align it more closely. Ultimately, this means that if I want to dive deep in a problem I find worth solving, I have to go solve it by my own agency — either through projects or more seriously through a company. Which ultimately means departing the job that shaped so much of who I’ve become today.
Projects
Last year I started working on four projects — three technical ones plus learning French.
French
For me, living in France for two months marked the completion of that project. Having lived my entire life in California, I wanted to embrace an entirely new culture, which is significantly driven by the language its people speak. So I stayed with a French family in a small town in the southern part of France called Trèves and spoke only French with them. But the cultural curiosity is only part of the story. Truth be told, I also wanted to prove to myself that I could learn anything I wanted. Learning a language is hard, especially when I had only given myself 4 months between starting to learn it seriously and deciding to live there for a two months. And beyond just the language, I found that perhaps the greatest difficulty was grappling with starting completely from scratch in a new country. I travelled alone, and didn’t know anyone beforehand, which means from the moment I landed in Charles De Gaulle, I was effectively 10 feet outside my comfort zone. I settled into the Uber that picked me up from the airport, and learned the driver’s story over the hour of traffic to the St. Christoper’s Hostel. That set the tone for the rest of my trip. By the end, it felt like I had built out a parallel life for myself in a different corner of Earth, and grew immensely, intangibly as a person in return.
Espresso Machine
I spent all of July this year working to build an espresso machine from scratch with a colleague of mine. On June 10th, I came back from France, and on June 12th, he told me he was leaving Matic to commence graduate school in the UK. We gave it our all for the next month, and came 70% of the way there before he ultimately moved. It’s on me in the coming year to pick up the pieces and brew myself a latte from my completed machine.
Research
Last year, I started doing research work at Berkeley. I reached out to professors with an unconventional ask, having already graduated, but I had a desire to do work in sustainable energy, learn engineering skills outside of software, and work in a more academic setting. I’ve learned an immense amount from the experience. In fact, it was at some point writing code late into the night for my research work where, despite having built projects for over a decade, for the first time I felt a real agency in my ability to write truly great software.
In last year’s reflection, I wrote out my ambitious plans — the work started as a volunteer project, but in wanting to advocate for myself, I asked to get paid. The professor agreed, but in spite of me following up every few months for a year and a half, it never actualized. It probably won’t. I’ve gotten to stage where I’ve learned an incredible amount, but the path ahead appears shorter than the path behind, and I want to steer my work in a direction that better fits my long term plans. Beyond a desire to take my research work to the finish line, my learning has started to taper, and I plan to conclude it by March 2024. I determined last year to publish a paper or present at a conference, but that no longer seems like a goal worth shooting for — though a tool called CompoNet will emerge from my work, that I can hope future electrical engineers will find tremendous value in.
Spacebar
My final project Spacebar, is one I’ve enjoyed working on with Kanyes and Sam. Individually, I think I’ve hit a similar point where I can keep learning individual pieces of technology as we build new features, but I’ve shifted my ambition towards caring about the product more. I’m far more excited to learn a new skill that helps us ship this to a live audience than I am to learn a skill in isolation. That wasn’t always true. Collectively, I think I watched my friends grow a lot in their skills as well, as teammates first, then as designers and engineers. For the early chunk of this year, I became incredibly frustrated when the bulk of the work was done by only two of us, and I didn’t do a great job communicating that frustration openly. It had reminded me of a similar point when I was working on Iris, and felt let down and alone, when during our toughest moments, we struggled to even get all three of us on a call together. Today, that seems like a distant past, and am hopeful that rests permanently behind us, as I’m consistently reminded by my friends what an nth level of ownership and seriousness mean.
My life
I find myself most frustrated with myself over my habits this past year. I spent a third of my year eating clean and working out, and another two-thirds on the diametrically opposite side. I still haven’t figured out some of the basics, how to sleep and wake up around the same time each day, how to eat healthy meals at a healthy time, and gifting myself that extra five percent energy boost from just having my habits in order. I spent last year meal prepping, then slowly dropped that. I kept myself accountable by tracking my values in a journal every night, then dropped that too. I’d like to think that I was doing that to focus on work, but in the end, it probably backfired. I find myself getting tired more easily, fighting to have the energy to keep up with my demanding schedule. I could’ve prevented a lot of that by instilling more rigor into my habits.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
—James Clear, Atomic Habits
Three years ago, I read Atomic Habits, and resonated deeply with it — I toted terms like habit stacking on my website when I tried to describe how I read audiobooks on my half-marathon runs to kill two birds with one stone.
Shortly after, I made a list called 5 Fundamentals, where I noted down: Consistent sleep, consistent exercise, eat healthy, time off, and read. If I had to rank myself on these out of 5, I would give myself a 3/5 for consistent sleep. I got enough, but not at consistent hours, and I would often wake up exhausted even after 8 hours because it was from 4am to noon. I’d give myself 4/5 on consistent exercise and 2/5 on eat healthy — my main failure was the “consistent” part. I wasn’t disciplined enough to keep the habit sturdy. It just took one week of catching a cold or long week at work to throw me off my game for the next 2 months. For time off, I earned a 5/5 since I took a lot of time off to travel this year, but I wish I had sprinkled it into my life in a more sustained way. Finally, I give myself a 3/5 on reading — I pushed myself incredibly hard to keep learning, but my breath of reading started and stopped with technical subjects. I give myself mostly a pass because that was my main focus this year, but I think it’s important to read more broadly across disciplines if I’m serious about solving important problems in the world at large.
Mostly, I’m frustrated because I know I’m not hitting my full potential. With each passing year, it becomes more unacceptable to me that I haven’t figured out basic habits like sleep. At 2am in Art Bar NYC, as we finished the last of our espresso martini’s, my friend Sam made a comment in passing how Wall St. was a parade of 32 year-old men who looked about 50, where the concrete walls and work-hard-play-hard culture had beaten down on them over the years.
The words were aimed to be harmless, but struck me at my core. I could see myself in 10 years, dark bags tattooed under my tired eyes. I’m 34, but permanently exhausted from the decade of sleep deprivation. I’ve lost nearly all of my hair at this point, and it makes me look 20 years my senior, and gained a physique younger me would’ve detested. Friend’s kids at Diwali parties think of me when they describe typical Indian uncles. I dress nice and groom, but it doesn’t fully cloak the damage. I walk down the street, I see two younger men, in their mid twenties. They glance at me. They’ll probably remark to their friends how silicon valley culture really beat down on men over the years.
I need to take control of my habits now. I have strong ambitions, and I’m not going to get there if I start disregarding my habits. This year, I need to invest a lot more effort in figuring out the basics that I will carry with me into the future, and not compromise.
My Values
As I finish out my writing, I wanted to another moment to reflect on my values. Last year, I wrote a quick journal each day with Christina — it helped remind me daily of the principles by which I wanted to live, and we did it nearly 200 times. This year, that fell off. It was tremendously valuable, and I’d like to pick it back up.
My values for this year are nearly entirely different from the ones I had written last year. I realized midway through writing this that last year’s were too vague to really know if I was really living by them. More importantly, I felt like they didn’t resonate as much anymore. Instead of being the prism through which I make my decisions, they were more of commandments that I needed to follow. I wanted to shift towards something that would help show me the world in a different color, during times of confusion.
This year’s are:
- Question everything important — I learned this one from work, where I was given a project to improve the cameras signal processing pipeline on the robot after changing to using infrared caused some major regressions. The first week I got started with this, 5 people, including the person who originally wrote most of the code, and the CEO himself, told me false base assumptions about what was going wrong. I was even told that the problem was in the camera itself, and there was nothing I could do to fix it. After essentially throwing everything I was told out the window, I started to dig in from scratch, and after two weeks of long work, I was able to fix it. I learned then that people have a bias towards just believing at face value what smart people say. Instead of trusting the contents of their statements, people implicitly trust the fancy degree, track record, or title, even if the statements are mistaken.
- Move at breakneck speed — The older I get, the more I really believe in this one. I genuinely believe people feel a great sense of comfort in “taking the time to think through things” and I’ve seen them, myself included, use that to justify procrastinating getting things done into oblivion — too long to ship something, too long to quit their plateaued job, to long to say something directly, tripping all over their words and defeating their own point. Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Github, has two sayings that I deeply resonate with: the first is that “a week is 2% of a year”, and the second is that “time is the denominator”. In fact, much of the most important work was also done incredibly fast. This does not mean compromising quality of work, or prioritizing speed at the cost of everything else, but it’s also important to challenge yourself to realize: if you’re not sweating a little, you’re probably not moving fast enough.
- Enjoy the present moment — I learned this one from my girlfriend Christina. Between full-time technical classes, recruiting, research at LBNL, and working a part-time job at her co-op, she often deals with just as much stress I do, but I admire her ability to stay cheerful and smell the roses through it. Conversely, in my day to day, I rarely take time to get present to the moment and smile, or squeeze in the little things that brighten my day. More tactfully, I think it means I have a lot of room to better compartmentalize my life. Not let troubles in one area bleed into every area.
- Keep an open door — This one comes from a formative essay I read by Richard Hamming four years back: “[T]here is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.” As I think about my life, I’m still not great about welcoming interruptions at work, or at home. I often work with my door closed, because I’d like to get slightly more work in. But I think opening your door opens you up to feedback, and that feedback may serve critical in guiding the work towards what’s truly important. More broadly as a person, I believe in being an open book, beyond just work, for the same reason. It’s something I’ll continue working towards this year.
Fin
As I ended this year in New York City, I recounted the countless artistically decorated bars I reconnected with friends in. Some bars even played interesting music, which faded into the background as I listened to the solemn theme marking their quarter life crisis, juxtaposing the brilliant ambience that cast our conversation. Nearly 3 years into our careers, I listened to bitter-sweet stories of otherwise ambitious friends coasting — mostly through their work, but leaking into other areas of their life. While I don’t quite feel that way in my own work — I worked really hard this year — it forced me to notice where I was descending into mediocrity in my own life. Where I was settling, allowing the winds of life to drift me from where I needed to be.
I don’t think I met my bar of remarkable. To those of whom I get to craft memories with in the coming year, I hope you see me meet, and exceed it this time.
Finally: To my family, my friends, and my wonderful girlfriend of four years; my mentors who continue challenging and guiding me; all the new friends I got to meet this year, and the old friends who’ve supported me throughout the years — I wanted to offer you my sincerest thank you for helping me become the man I am today. As always, I’ll continue fighting hard to make you proud, and make your unwavering belief in me worth it.
—Shalin