début
Through all the cacophony of this year — through the silence of my closest friends packed in my Mountain View living room, unbreathing. Leaning towards the projector to anticipate the roaring Superbowl LVIII touchdown that would determine if the 49ers would beat the Chiefs.
Through the pounding bass that quaked the floor in the dimly lit Fremont one-bedroom, when my hands steered the dials and knobs of my Pioneer FLX4 in pursuit of guiding the rhythm of one song into the melody of the next.
Through the chattering teeth that followed me from the psychedelic Brooklyn warehouse that entranced thousands of bodies in unison past the cold New York winds to the inside of a black UberXL.
Through the loud moments chasing a robot on gray carpets through wooden doors, and the quiet moments in my gray 2015 Prius, staring at a red light trying to turn green.
Through the explosion of emotions, ideas, conversations, information, tasks, thoughts that my mind was ringing with this year, there was one idea that rang louder than it all.
Remarkable.
Remarkable to me is a year in which at the end of the year, I have become the man who I had the vision of becoming at the beginning of the year — the man I measure myself against in my reflections.
I wished, more than anything else, to make this year a remarkable one. It stuck with me when my pen hit paper about this time last year, and it engraved itself into one of the final sentences in my reflection — that I didn’t meet my bar of remarkable.
Like years past, I tried really hard to sprint towards that future me, someone who is competent for himself to such an extent, that competence can be shared more broadly with friends and family, close society, and eventually the world at large.
My parents have cultivated a beautiful, wonderful habit of emailing me quotes, articles, and motivational ideas that had a profound impact on them. In a particular email my dad sent me titled “34 life lessons from my 34 years”, I learned this idea:
“If you look back at yourself from a year ago and you don't cringe at your outputs, habits, behaviors, or actions, you should be worried. That "cringe" sensation is a sign of your growth.”
Looking back on this year, I feel a long ways away from the person I was in 2023. In last year’s reflection, I told my story grimly, but I could hear in my tone, the naive optimism lustering through the undertone of disappointment that the year didn’t go the way I had wanted it to. I wanted to justify my decisions as being on a trajectory towards something magnificent. Today, I feel less naive — I’ve realized just how difficult it was to even get what I thought were my “close to finished” projects to a point where they were finished, and it’s a lesson that ran parallel at Matic, where it took nearly everything from the entire team — layoffs, pay cuts, and executing on the precipice of the remaining runway — to get from almost shipped to shipped.
A large part of me feels jaded today — my projects are still not actually done and Matic still doesn’t actually have customers lining out the door. While the reality of succeeding has been priceless to journey through, what started as jaded perhaps earlier in the year, shifted towards apathetic, unfeeling, dead towards the end. What a few years back felt like immense, almost unreasonable excitement to start a company has morphed into dread, and I don’t know how I can possibly go through it.
my year
I’ve built a habit of planning my travel at the end of the year — it’s the time I feel I can most step off the treadmill of slack notifications and endless TODO’s because its also the time the rest of the world takes off to stay close to loved ones. I started my year in a skyrise in New York City, travelling with my friend Sam — the first time I had ever travelled with a friend. I ended the year by driving 6 thousand miles across the US over three weeks, leaving my apartment in Mountain View, crossing the snowy Colorado Rockies and the great plains to Tennessee, through the forests of Mississippi and Alabama into the swamps of Louisiana, before making my way back through the country roads of Texas and around the canyons of Arizona to my parent’s home in Orange County. I drove for insanely long hours through all kinds of weather and terrain, finally saw the country I’ve lived in my whole life, and had deeply meaningful moments with kind strangers from all walks of life. I was joined by Sam for the Louisiana and Texas legs of the trip, and had an unforgettable time travelling together again, but I also discovered a deeper love and appreciation for spending time with myself, something I didn’t experience when I went to France.
I reached a five year milestone with my wonderful partner Christina in October — we painted hilarious portraits of each other to celebrate. I threw my third Superbowl party with my roommate Kanyes in February. I hit a three year milestone at Matic in May, a two year milestone for my projects Spacebar and CompoNet, and turned 25 in June.
I missed a flight for the first time in April, and landed in Indianapolis, Indiana way too late in the evening only to drive four hours through one of the worst rainstorms to Urbana, Illinois. I attended a conference there for the first time, and presented my research to the rest of the attendees. I stayed in my colleague Nathan’s home in Terre Haute, Indiana, and reconnected with high school friends at the last minute in Chicago, Illinois.
I visited my family way less than I would have liked. I went home only twice to visit them, and didn’t see them over Christmas and New Year to pursue my road trip. But I travelled to Maryland with them for a weekend to see extended family, and Christina and I went camping with them on another weekend. Camping was incredible.
I learned a lot of important, powerful concepts this year. At work, I gained fluency across nearly every part of our company’s vast codebase, led and owned core parts of our perception stack, and gained a real confidence in my ability to write Rust, which I believe is one of the most crucial programming languages one can learn. I learned to DJ and more broadly music theory, taking weekly lessons from a career musician who has two decades of experience. I read expansively diverse books, learned an enormous amount of history, watched nearly every wildlife documentary on Netflix, and read all 66 books of the Holy Bible. While I maintain an infinite curiosity to learn about the world we live in, I feel a real sense of depth in my own competence as a person as a result of the consistently bold choices I’ve made and difficult experiences I’ve sought out this year, and years past.
My learning professionally also plateaued around halfway this year, and it made my excitement for my work and my projects nearly vanish. For the first time I felt a real frustration having to spend my day at work, and spend my nights and weekends working on projects. I really wished to grow deeper algorithmically and mathematically, and I just hadn’t been able to make enough time for that. Instead, I had been pulled to focus my effort on things I’d already gained skills in to add the fastest value towards an outcome. At work, this has been through dragging more time into building infrastructure for our camera stack; in Spacebar that has been through reinventing an entirely new, more scalable networking stack; and for CompoNet as well as for Spacebar and work, it has been through spending nearly all my time fixing bugs for the features we had already built.
I feel a strong dissonance investing time doing this, since the entire reason I’m working at a job and not starting my own company today was so I could spend a few years gaining core skills across engineering and business — I feel I’m still missing many core skills, and I feel an urgency to squeeze as much learning out of my time working as an employee as I still can. I had given myself ambitious goals for how I wanted to end these projects, by proving to myself that I can sell the years of solid, high quality software we’ve written through an acquisition — nothing short of that seems worth quitting for. But I’ve also grappled with the idea that time spent working to sell this is time not spent finding a important problem I want to go solve over the next 5+ years through building a compelling product, and a company around it.
As I shape up my goals for this coming year, I know I owe it to myself and my teammates, friends, mentors to depart Matic, Spacebar, Research in the best avenue that I can, even if it doesn’t mean directing all of my ambition towards the glorious outcome we once saw. I can’t destroy years of working hard to earn their trust and respect for desperate impatience. And I have to come to terms with spending some time prioritizing my relationship with them and my respect for the things we’ve built together over the burning fire in me that wants to blaze forward. But I also have to discover setting firm boundaries for myself to give myself a hard stopping point, and be okay with walking away.
In my personal habits, this year was a step in the right direction for me. I started the year off strong by cooking more healthy, nutritious meals. I had a significantly more consistent sleep schedule — I woke up and reached work earlier than all my previous years. Going to the gym has been something I’ve genuinely enjoyed since I was 16 years old, and yet I still find it hard to maintain consistency around it. I went for a large chunk for the first two months of the year, then stopped until about May, which is also when my discipline with eating went away. Towards the end of the year, I started going to the gym consistently and have reached a point where I am the most in shape I’ve been in a long time. I still fall victim to letting my health fall apart when stress at work increases, but I feel much better equipped to stay consistent now than I did last year. I completely cut out drinking towards the end of the year, and that helped me tremendously — I’ve grown tired of how I feel both while I drink and certainly the day after, and more importantly it no longer fits into the vision I have for who I want to become. So I’ve decided to permanently leave that in my past.
I wasn’t perfect with my health this year, I messed up many times — there were months where I ate really junk foods, didn’t get much sleep, drank way too much and felt awful the next day. I still could be sleeping and waking up earlier, especially when I’m not up to anything useful anyway. I ended last year incredibly frustrated over my habits. This year, I’ve learned a lot about myself, and I’m optimistic that I’ll build a real cadence for my health moving forward.
my values
Each year, I like to go through my values. It’s the time I get to be honest with you about how well I lived my life according to the principles I sought to hold myself to. After reflecting on the values I had written from last year, I’ve realized they still ring true to me, so I’ve left them mostly unchanged.
- Question everything important — 2/5. This year, it was really difficult for me to find the courage to really push back, question requirements, and be a bit disagreeable to seek truth. There were distinct moments when I lived true to this, but it’s not something I’ve built a real comfort around. In fact, I feel that in a lot of ways I’ve regressed from where I used to be, especially at work.
- Move at breakneck speed — 4/5. This year I’ve probably written and shipped more code than any year in the past, travelled more, exercised more, learned more, and moved faster across nearly all the metrics I care about. In spite of this, I still felt like I was too slow to ship Spacebar, too slow to respond and reach out to friends, too slow to celebrate the special moments with my family and girlfriend.
- Enjoy the present moment — 2/5. It was only once I was alone and sober in bars in random U.S. states, and forced myself to make friends with strangers, that I realized I how uptight, stifled, unfun I felt. Even when it didn’t match the context, I’d spend too much time in my own thoughts, thinking about my goals for work or something in the past, unable to enjoy the moment in front of me. It was an antithesis to how I acted in college — I tried to be quite intentional about being present, loose, fun back then.
- Keep an open door — 3/5. I definitely embraced this at work. In previous years, I tended to prefer a zero-distraction don’t-talk-to-me work day to really maximize my engineering output. But as I come closer to leaving, I’ve realized that best things I’ll get to keep from my time at Matic are the people I’ve worked with, so I’ve been way more welcoming of the random times I get pulled to go help someone, answer questions, and I now actively seek out others to collaborate with often. At home, I quite literally kept my bedroom door closed most of the year though.
fin
At this point, I’ve driven my four minute commute to work and back probably a (few) thousand times. On the drives back, I was usually tired enough that I didn’t want to listen to yet another UK boiler room x tech house mix that had been glued to my ears all day, and that next Hardcore History podcast episode could wait. So I made a silly game with myself — how can I complete my straight-and-four-right-turns route as efficiently as possible, precisely actuating my foot along the pedal for the exact wheel RPM I’d need to get past the yellow lights without my speedometer needing to hit zero. Then every day, after parking my car amidst the jigsaw of others along the lot, I’d eagerly await the sci-fi-blue dashboard of my Prius, where like a high score in an arcade, in small 8bit letters it would show me something like Trip: 4min 13sec.
There was a particular night, late in September on a full moon, where I drove home, straight-and-three-right-turns — then just before the final right, I broke commandment and turned left. For a few months now, thoughts had slowly dawned on me that everything in my life had become the exact same — wake up, work, go home, projects, sleep, repeat — but that alone wasn’t the issue. It was that none of the areas I was pouring my life into seemed to be moving forward.
I parked my car along a random cul-de-sac next to the semicircle of sixty-year-old homes with warm lights dimly gleaming from the windows. Across the street, I saw a woman get out of her navy Tesla Model 3 and walk towards her home carrying groceries. She was probably married, maybe her husband worked in tech. They probably had two kids, a boy and a girl. The boy might’ve just graduated high school and the girl a rising freshman at Mountain View High. They were probably getting ready to eat dinner soon.
As I felt that moment of sonder, I reflected back on my own life. I felt disappointed by this year, and for the second year in a row, I felt I had been far from my bar of remarkable. I felt like I had grown past so much of what I was working on — projects at work, Spacebar, research — but I didn’t feel like I had any agency to change it, at least not for a while. I felt angry at myself, for not being able to find the excitement for the same stuff I had been advocating for so passionately only months earlier. I hated that I had worked incessantly for years to meaningfully shape our product at Matic only to have my already pretty-low startup salary slashed drastically — it meant my runway for starting a company was getting slashed. I hated that I wasn’t learning at the pace I wanted to, and that the final decision wasn’t up to me, even in the projects I founded.
As I started the car again to complete my short journey back home, I resolved to myself that it was time to make a real change. I was going to need to face some the most difficult choices in the coming year, but I promised myself that around this time next year, I was going to look back and be able to say it was finally remarkable.
To everyone reading this — I offer my sincerest thank you for believing in me, for encouraging me, for helping me in times of confusion, and for laughing with me. You’ve played an immense role in helping me become the man I am, and I feel forever grateful for your unwavering support over the years. I’ll continue fighting hard to make it worth it.
— Shalin