Five, Seven, and Ten

10 years ago, I was studying CompSci at SPSU. I had just gotten my first smartphone, a Nexus One. I had started contributing to my first open source project, Paktahn. Dad had died about a half year earlier.

7 years ago, I had just met a woman I would fall in love with, Norma Nyhoff. I was living on my own for the first time at Arts Center Tower in Midtown. I was a Senior Engineer at Rentpath and not very happy about it. I had written and open sourced Coleslaw.

5 years ago, I taught my first class at The Iron Yard, a bootcamp where I helped over 100 people become programmers. I was living with Norma and our two dogs. We were about to rent a house in East Atlanta.

Last year, I got married. I taught another 100 people to program at the Flatiron School. I joined Calendly as a Senior Engineer. I made substantial progress on rawbones, an NES emulator written in ReasonML with one of my best friends, James Dabbs.

Somewhere I read that "Unattainable Earth", the title of my favorite Milosz book, is most closely translated as "Earth too huge to be grasped". In a similar way, these events feel like they surpass my understanding. In the last decade, a life has grown. I foolishly tend to think of my life as something that is planned or designed, but that is not what happens to us. We take a step and a new world blooms as our feet land.

I hope I can be excited and curious more than fearful in 2020. I hope to write more here and perhaps listen to myself again, the way I used to.

I came up with some resolutions but won't share them. The important thing is the shift in focus. I want to pursue programming for artistic purposes, generative graphics and sound. And maybe learn to solder and build a keyboard. Hardware seems fun, graphics and audio seem fun. The web is powerful but not exciting. So I'll work, spend time with the people I love, and see where my passions lead me.