2023 in Review 📆

🎵 The song for this post is Shape da Future, by Hideki Naganuma. Been obsessed with his work recently. 🎵

Twice, I've been late to Year in Review posts. In 2020, I wrote most of it in January, but only posted in July, because I got a new laptop and was too lazy to port my blogging software. In 2021, I was so bruised by a breakup, I simply needed more time to find the words and start functioning again. We're ~50% through 2024, so which case is this? Logistical, or emotional?

The latter, unfortunately. I split with Ramp in October. It was the best company of my career and a very hard split. Like the end of many meaningful relationships, it happened in phases, where I suspect each side has lots they wish the other side understood, but seemed unable to, and words stopped working. This happened within 2 weeks of my grandfather passing, after a years-long battle with dementia. There's a third major grief-and-pain narrative at play that even my oversharing ass isn't going to publish, so find me in person if you want details. The year ended with a grotesque terrorist attack, after which I got to watch the victim country disproportionately bomb the hell out of a civilian population they've kept under horrible subjugation for most of my lifetime, the violence of which continues to this day. I saw many people I grew up with, and worked with, cheering it on; months and months of images of babies pulled out of rubble, while organizations like the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders call it the worst humanitarian crisis they've ever seen. The bombs still fall, the language of dehumanization continues on all sides, and people are still cheering.

So, this post is delayed. 2023 was a lot to digest.

My late 30's have been hit with pretty severe narratives of grief, loss, heartbreak, and pain. I'm losing relatives and seeing others decline. This storyline peeks into 2024, but: Sapo's "continue monitoring" heart murmur rapidly declined into Stage C Congestive Heart Failure. He nearly died a few weeks ago, and even with treatment I probably have less than a year left with him. I just gotta love him the same while watching his heart fail. The last few years have been marked by deep pain over things I have little control over.

It reminds me: the year I turned 30, Trump got elected. A few years into that, while we were all screaming about declining civil liberties on Twitter, someone wrote: "you know the thing I find most surprising about my 30's is all the fascism. Nobody tells you about the fascism in your 30's!!" The joke, of course, is that the fascism is a "point in history" thing, not a "30s" thing. So: I don't know how much of these Pain Narratives I'm running into are structural to this phase of my life, but some are. Watching parents age, realizing it's unlikely I'll have kids in time to meet them. A lot of people divorce around now; pets and relationships from the 20's end in the 30's. A lot of this is "the breaks," and a lot is just the world.

It can all hurt like hell. But also, I have this cartoon on my wall:

I am typing all this in July, so the pain has been very real. But: I'm coming out of this more whole. More resolved, more relaxed, and more myself. And "more myself" feels like something great for a change. After 5 years at a high-growth startup, and 14 working across 7 companies, finally taking this time and recalibrating has provided a level of comfort and self-assurance I can't remember having before. I'm playing more with my dog. I'm traveling, I'm dancing, I'm dreaming, and learning things for fun again.

All this to say: if I tried to write this post sooner, I wouldn't have come out so solid. I need to be reminded sometimes, when everything is crumbling, that it's just a matter of time to feeling like I do now: fucking great. This too shall pass.

Anyways, here are some personal narratives for the year 2023:

Pablotimer (or, the essay I wrote instead of this post)

I do have an essay I wrote during the Hard Times. Most Year-In-Review posts have a professional update. I don't feel like writing more than I have already, but pablotimer.com has my feelings on the industry and what I'll be doing next, at least as of February. I'm pretty proud of the essay; it takes about 20 minutes to read, and you can spend a whole lot longer if you click the links and watch the videos. As with most of my writing, there's a lot there if you're hungry.

Looking back on it a few months later, it's a bit... defensive? And aggro, at the same time? I still think VC as an industry is, like the US defense industry, largely a waste, existing as something of a jobs program to give capital to mediocrities. But these days I live for a lot more than just staring at shit I hate and feeling clever for hating it. The point of the timer was to take the pressure off and spend some time figuring out what I'm really about; I'm cheating again by mentioning 2024, but: I wrote most of that in December and January, before I did 2 months of travel in Asia. I hit "publish" from a hotel on that trip, and the aggro attitude behind that post was already out of date when I got back in April. So I suppose it's working 🧘

Big blogging

Last year I drove my energy head-on into fears I had of speaking out, making a splash, and being noticed for things I really believed. There were a few reasons for this, tactical and emotional.

I was surprised when I learned that 2022's So you're using a weird language got frontpaged on Hacker News, and, while it didn't frontpage, Programming culture in the late aughts also got posted with a decent discussion, without me knowing (and submitted by a personal hero! Thanks Dan Luu! ❤️).

So last year, while I was getting fed up with a few strategic things in the company, after years fed up with industry, and after having a gross conversation with a Staff Eng at another company who talked down at me while saying ignorant things, I wrote Where have all the hackers gone!?, which frontpaged and got pretty big. I followed up with We were rockstars, which was a critical response to some great articles by another personal hero.

I didn't get any real audience for Fighting Over Frameworks, which is fair, I didn't plug it that hard. Still a bit sad because I really liked it. On the Ramp blog, I wrote What Matters, Suffers and while I was checking, it was their best-performing post, next to my other post on there, Elixir at Ramp (a follow-up to that, "the Elixir story at Ramp over the years," now there's a juicy blog post for me to write). I had two other drafts I never ended up posting, but they were pretty good and I may repost them here. I also hoped for a bit more from Technical Storytelling: Behind-the-Scenes of Elixir at Ramp where I talk narrative craft to an industry that desperately, desperately needs it. But it is an "inside baseball" post, and to get it you need to critically read 2 blog posts, which is strictly more than twice as many as most people are willing to do.

I'm tempted to write a reflection like:

The big learning: people don't fucking read. We were rockstars had a bajillion people thinking I was advocating a "RETVRN" to the rockstar era, when I was just using that moniker in the headline ("rockstar" doesn't appear anywhere else in the article) to demonstrate the greater point that tech labor was treated like intelligent creatives instead of interchangeable commodities, and that is partially responsible for everyone is so glum.

The comments to Where have all the hackers gone was mostly people too thick to see I used the word "friend" as shorthand for "person I know" ("partner to the person I was actually visiting, who came home during our hangout, and proceeded to pick an opinion fight with me, poorly" was too fucking long). They read my contempt for the guy, ignored the entire rest of the post, and decided that Pablo guy? He's just a real jerk!

Also: if you're chasing shallow engagement, it's not hard to get your shit trending. Just mention programming languages and write so that someone interprets "choice of programming language is related to how smart you are," same as paulg did 20 years ago. People won't read anything you actually wrote, but they'll re-share the article and fight each other in the comments.

And that's all true. But I also felt this:

Do you know how many people were jazzed enough to sign up for my mailing list, that's literally never published anything? I'm sure it's small numbers to people who play this game seriously, but more than I thought! My writing does strike chords with people. Blogging is incredibly lonely, but I still get wonderful email from people this resonated with.

One thing that's becoming clear in my life (and a necessary silver lining of a lot of the Bad Things): on top of being a shit way to live your life, "playing safe" doesn't save you. Be the weird goblin you want to be. In many cases, you don't even have a choice, your goblin will catch up to you.

Big adventure 🔥

For the first half of 2023, I was leaning into my "brand" (thus all that blogging) while also pumping a lot more time and love into my work at Ramp. In June I took a vacation, came back, and my team got stabbed in the throat by another team. This wasn't the first time I got stabbed by someone for whom Ramp was their first full-time job, and it wasn't the first time leadership reacted extremely poorly. I didn't trust it was worth continued investment if I was being given second-class treatment while they rewarded promising engineers who were also destructive, immature egoists; especially since nobody was engaging with the data we presented or the the technical arguments of our side. So during the second half of the year, I invested more in "saying yes" to adventures in life, and did a lot of Big Moves. This wasn't conscious, mind you, and it also made me a crappier employee. This is also when "grandfather passing" and Unmentioned Big Shitty Narrative #3 happened, so it was probably also somewhat of a coping mechanism for all the crumbling.

(if you're munching on 🍿 over this, relax. Ramp is still the best company for almost everyone to work for, and on the whole, the technical leadership has a track record of being exceptional. Like any seasoned engineer I've shipped bugs to prod, even bad ones, and they didn't make me a terrible engineer. If you take this account as credible (and I obviously think you should), understand that managers and leaders are allowed to ship bugs, even bad ones, in their careers too. And, naturally, they're smart people who've got context that I don't)

With that out of the way, here are some big things I said yes to in H2:

Bought a car

Meet Alucard:

I knew I wanted a nice EV. I wasn't getting a Tesla; aside from Elon ruining my favorite product (Twitter) and being an A-level jackass, I also hate it as a financial instrument. Many Tesla owners: complete chuds, not a club I want membership in. They're neat cars when they're not on fire, but not enough to make "Bay Area techie driving a Tesla" feel tolerable for me. In addition to the Lucid, I also test drove a Polestar, Volkswagen, BMW, and liked them in that order.

The Lucid won several awards, and it felt great to drive, but getting it also symbolized "doing something really nice for myself." I like stories like Bernie still driving a normal-ass car, or this picture of legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby's desk. I don't think I'm a Fancy Bitch who needs things to be fancy to enjoy it; I'm a vociferous defender of Living Más to my friend group. But regarding upscale things: if I'm able to afford them, I'd rather decide that Fancy Shit is for Basic Bitches after trying, instead of before? I spent all of my 20's making a virtue out of denying myself simple joys, like some kind of monk. Righteousness had its purpose but I think I OD-ed on it.

Why buy a car? Cars are poisonous death that ruin our cities. Still true. But: my friend Adi has one, and when he left town and let us use it, I noticed my friends and I went on a lot more adventures. Last summer I went on dates with a woman in San Mateo and realized that if I wanted to date in the broader Bay, it'd be nice to have my own wheels. I could see my brother more easily, or my parents when they visited for the summer. I could be that "friend with a car" when folks needed to load things. So, again, "try something nice and decide it's a mistake later" over "but my politics say it's bad."

It's also helping me understand my relationship to sadness and anger. I wrote in another post: I think a lot (not all, but a lot) of political sadness and anger are the expression of someone who wants their personal sadness witnessed, and political positions allow you to do this safely. Holding back on something that might make me happy to make an obscure political point may just be holding me back. I don't mean to abandon everything: after all, fuck Elon and Tesla. But a year into the experiment: relaxing feels nice.

Priceless

I'd been to the Priceless Festival in 2017 and 2018, I went again for "half-Price" in 2021. These were a big part of my Karen relationship and I had trouble enjoying myself, often feeling like resented baggage. But the 2021 one, as we were separating, I split off more and felt like I could enjoy it if I did it my own way. I skipped 2022 because it was all still too raw, but in 2023 I gathered the courage and a crew, and we had an amazing time.

Burning Man

I had a lot of fear on returning, especially with a camp where I didn't know anybody; turned out to be a revelatory, life-changing experience. Main post here.

Pablo Bloom

I've recently made it a habit to properly celebrate birthdays. For my 20's, I'd get a milkshake. But really, my birthday (like everything else) depressed me, so I just wanted it to pass uneventfully. A cool birthday is a reflection (and ingredient) of a renewed zest to fucking live.

This year, I did "Pablo Bloom." A bunch of us in a cabin with home-cooked meals, games, and a bit of theatre.

🤖 ＤＩＶＥＲＳＯＴＲＯＮ 🤖

I didn't blog about this! And I intend to, so I won't go super deep here, but: I proposed, got accepted, and built a live theatre/interactive installation for an underground event, then performed it for a few hundred people. It was incredibly frightening, and also a rousing success. Many, many people hugged me and called it a favorite part of the event, and it felt mine.

A quick summary: the piece mixed narratives about AI (I think I'm just a skeptic, but compared to many people here, I'm a total hater (1, 2, 3)) with my very conflicted feelings about diversity initiatives, especially in workplaces. Latinos are not very well-represented in tech, my own Latino identity is confused since I'm half, and my mother is a short, brown immigrant woman who speaks with an accent and got her Masters in Organizational Development; of course I have feelings about justice, work, diversity, and inclusion.

I spent years going to these events and feeling like the art there a) sucked, and b) wasn't "for me" because inasmuch they either thought they were challenging, they really weren't ("have you considered that Corporations are Bad?!"), or they thought they were fun and funny but weren't (a lot of the art here is targeted for high people wanting a good party, this usually meant hundreds of sex puns). Choosing to do this was a way to say "don't complain, build," and bring art that I thought was interesting. It was a challenge to make something that could be either silly, stupid fun or a meaningful and interesting commentary for anyone who wanted it, and I think we did it? I'll try to polish up and release the full post.

(I'm using "I" a lot, but it absolutely wouldn't have happened without Saurya Velagapudi, Dora Heng, and Tammie Siew 🙏. I can't recommend them as collaborators enough)

NYE

I didn't blog about this either, but I organized a last-minute New Year's Eve party. I got a ton of champagne, had a "make your own pizza" station, and Saurya and I brought in the New Year based on this meme:

Here's the clip from Seinfeld if you haven't seen it:

Stroke of midnight, we went for it:

Again, it was beautiful fun, and reminded me how lucky I felt to have the friendships that I had.

What's next?

At that NYE party, Saurya said something that resonated. Paraphrasing: "I got really sad. Because I saw how temporary it was. So, so much is going to change next year. [Couple A] is trying to get pregnant. [Couple B] is in a relationship crisis and I don't know if they're gonna make it. [Person] is very high up in a company that's becoming extremely high-profile. Dora and I are getting married. All of us will have our lives fundamentally change in 2024." (This too shall pass). "But you? You may change most of all. You're the biggest wildcard of all of us, and I really can't predict what you'll want, need, or run into."

Halfway though 2024, I think he's right. It's taken a lot for me to shed enough grief to even author this, but I'm thrilled with the uncertainty of what comes next. I'm learning Japanese and Vietnamese, and may move to 日本 or Việt Nam this year. I'm looking into being a dance fitness trainer again. I dream of touring Latin America. I may double down on accordion (this has fallen off a bit, but I still dream). I've had weeks where I was dancing twice a day. And of course, I may still hack weird languages and write.

Or: I might sire a child, or multiple children with different people. I might be killed in gang violence abroad over gambling debts. I might adopt several new dogs. I might go hardcore into branding myself and networking, and posting to LinkedIn regularly. I might be a porn producer. I might fall in love with backpacking and being outdoorsy. I might become a falconer. I might become a DJ. I might become a falconer DJ, with several adopted dogs.

Whatever it is, I hope I don't lose myself along the way. I'm really starting to like the guy.

Photos and grab bag

I put the photos in an expandable element so folks don't see the scrollbar and be like "Ay Dios mio!" Here's a grab bag of 2023 photos/narratives.

Photos, videos, and more!

I was a groomsman at one of my bestie's weddings in Washington DC. This happened in H2, so good cheer was sorely needed. It also let me see some friends I have beautiful memories with who I rarely get to see.

♠♥♣♦

It melted my heart to get the next text message. Robert, Emma, and I then did eat junk food and watch Goosebumps and Barbie.

♠♥♣♦

Except for the colossal loss, it was a great year for family. Robert, Annalisa and I were all in town together a few times. Here's to more.

♠♥♣♦

I went to Guatemala in June. I think the last time I'd gone was pre-pandemic, with Karen? Saurya and Dora joined me, it was some of the most successful "friends travel" I can remember. Saurya noted "I've known you for nearly 15 years, and I'm still seeing different sides of you. Watching you here is different."

I never lived there full-time; I visited over 10 times growing up, and spent a summer there when I was 12. While I'm not an immigrant, something I do note about immigrants in the States: they always have so much more behind them than you can see. I thought of this a lot during my grandfather's Celebration of Life ceremony. I knew him nearly 40 years, and I see photos of who he was before, and I feel like there's so much I didn't know.

Learning Vietnamese and Japanese reminds me: I know so much Spanish, actually. I can free associate, talk about life and dreams and goals. Body parts, organs, ordinal directions, numbers, colors, animals, relatives and family members, dates and times, directions... it's all just there.

more to unearth here for sure.

♠♥♣♦

Let's do a few more related to my grandfather, and the celebration. Various photos I took photos of, as well as two bonus ones I found of my mom holding me at different points in my life.

Reminder, if you didn't know: my grandparents lived in the house with us growing up. We saw them every day. They were and are a second set of parents to me.

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Here are some random fun videos. I made this to flirt with a girl I liked who I noticed was watching my IG Stories. It didn't materialize. Robert's kids love it though.

Here's a demo of a really fun sculpture I got, and Robert and I "playing it."

Accordion has been very, uh, spotty this year. But I was on a great practice kick in July, and here's probably the best I've ever played it, on a full-length: Gaston, from Beauty and the Beast.

♠♥♣♦

I got the chance to see a lot of out-of-SF friends. Many of them, not enough!

I'm gonna dearly miss a lot of my Ramp coworkers. There's notes of sour when I talk about the split, but truly, it was a blessing to have this experience and work with many of the most talented, driven, creative people I've ever met. If we're lucky, life is long, and we can build together again.

♠♥♣♦

Holding down the fort was the local crew, especially my boi Saurya. Love you, man. There's a lot I don't love about San Francisco and why I ended up here, but it'd be a bargain for twice the price to have adventures, big and small, like I did with my friends here.

♠♥♣♦

Let's finish, per tradition, with photos of his highness. Pray for his heart.