Life & Music

2018 Year in Review

2018 was the most challenging year of my life. I watched my mom’s health decline and had to say goodbye forever. You can read more in my eulogy.

Eulogy for Mom

Nothing else bad happened this year. My anxieties were all focused on my mom’s health and all other setbacks and challenges seemed minor in comparison.

A lot of good happened. I feel more satisfied at work than I have in years (I started a new job and got promoted). I took three months off to spend with family, explore New York, and do a little bit of traveling.

My friendships feel stronger than ever. I have new friends and old friends I enjoy spending my time with. Life passes quickly and my friendships give me solace.

I feel more organized than ever. Part of it has to do with https://www.notion.so/ — the app I’m using to publish this. I could go on and on about how flexible and powerful it is. I’ll probably sunset my squarespace at some point and post to tumblr for posterity.

Grief is an emotion that comes and goes. The main thing that keeps me happy is thinking about the lives my mom would want us to lead.

Events

• Mom’s funeral

• New job and promotion

• Amsterdam

• Paris

• London

• Miami (Cupsteak)

• San Diego

• Chicago

• Weddings (Rob’s, Dan’s, Annie’s)

• Axe throwing

• Panorama

Books I Read - Sorted by Favorites

• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

• The Investor’s Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between

• An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

• The Island Dwellers: Stories

• The New Geography of Jobs

• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

• Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians, #1)

• Educated

• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

• Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color

• The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

• Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

• The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World

• Be Everything at Once: Tales of a Cartoonist Lady Person

• Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

• Thinking in Systems: A Primer

• iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–and What That Means for the Rest of Us

• When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

• Contagious: Why Things Catch On

• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

• China Rich Girlfriend (Crazy Rich Asians, #2)

• The Order of Time

• Full Disclosure

2017 Year in Review

2016 2015 2014

Life is short. My mom was diagnosed with a serious illness this year. One of my worst nightmares came true. The support from family and friends has been incredible.  

No matter how the bad situation, I’ll never lose sight of the things worth appreciating:

• Spending more time with my parents in NJ, but still continuing my life in NY
• Our family bond is stronger than ever
• Learning so much and feeling deeply
• Taking vacation days to spend with my family
• Work accommodating my situation (Work from home, time off)
• I still have some time to pursue my passions

That’s about all I want to share publicly. Feel free to reach out if you want to talk about it.

Now that we have the elephant out the way, let’s discuss less heavy matters :)

I’m at the age where my peers and I have all been working for a few years and are asking “is this it?”. I definitely have gripes about VTS in its current state, but overall I’m still very satisfied; I’m building something meaningful alongside people I care about. The Sandi Metz training at the end the year definitely ended 2017 on a high note. I still love the software industry and what it continuously teaches me.

But I want my life to be less defined by my work and job title. It’s a part of who I am but not all that I am. I want to continue to invest in health, relationships, and ideas. 

Ideas come in many forms. I’m pretty much always reading in my free time. Ideas come from conversations and imagery around New York. I want to share these ideas more.

Events

• Austin, Texas in September for Nate and Kendalls’s wedding
  • Shout out to KKao for giving me a great tour of the city
• Indianapolis in May for the Indy 500 with college friends
  • I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked the city
• San Francisco in January
  • So many friends and so many museums
• Tokyo trip was postponed indefinitely because of Mom’s illness
• Zenas’s wedding was great! I didn’t know anyone else but made friends
• I got a Nintendo Switch and a PS4 so I’m officially back to living out 16 year old Andrew’s dreams. Kind of kidding but multiplayer gaming is really a great way to hang out with friends without leaving your apartment 😅
• I paid off all my (private) student loans! 
• Gov Ball Friday Saturday was a blast
• EZOO for 3 days was exhausting but also a blast
  • I love Rezz 🌀__ 🌀
• My love for New York only grew stronger
• The outpouring of support for my family has been heartwarming
• I took Japanese classes for 5 months. I want to learn more in the future.
• Took a few hip hop dance classes that were really fun
• Meditation habit started strong but has been sporadic. Definitely want to to restart
• Winter break days with my family were so meaningful and reinvigorating

Books I Read - Sorted by Favorites

• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
• Principles: Life and Work
• Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
• Confident Ruby
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
• Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
• How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life
• Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
• The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
• Goodbye, Vitamin
• Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Appendix

2016 Year In Review

For the third year in a row! 2015 and 2014

Significant Events

• Spent two weeks in Taiwan
• Spent a week in Denver
• VTS went through a merger, series C
• Moved to East Village
• Strengthened friendships
• Organized my life in Trello, Wunderlist
• Became a tech lead
• Learned about likes and dislikes in dating
• Played a lot of great board games
• Learned a lot of great lessons from grandpa while in Taiwan
• Learned how to longboard
• Lots of fun parties
• Spent time with old friends

Books I Read - Sorted by Favorites

• Algorithms to Live By
  • Highly recommend checking it out
• Thinking, Fast and Slow
• The Industries of the Future
• Tools of Titans
• The Second Machine Age
• Essentialism
• Stuff Matters
• Door to Door
• The Road to Character
  • An easy life is not a good life
• The Art of Strategy
  • Great refresher of my college major
• The Alchemists
• The Geography of Genius
• 1Q84
• The Master Algorithm
• Gut
• The Sex Myth
• Clean Code
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
• D3.js in Action
• The Lessons of History
• Inventology
• Beginning Databases with PostgreSQL
• When Breath Becomes Air
• Data Science for Business
• The Effective Engineer
• The Sales Acceleration Formula
• How Asia Works
• The Future We Want
• So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed
• Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
• Endurance
• Finding North

Thoughts and ideas from my journal

• My grandpa has a lot of wisdom
  • Step by step - no need to rush a career
  • I aspire to be as successful as him
  • He started a business because he had to - his company was changing its strategy
  • Good suppliers, good clients, honest business
  • No second chances when it fails
  • Spent a day getting massages with my dad and grandpa; unusual, but fun experience
• Good managers and mentors are important
• Some of my old friends are also software engineers now; interesting trend
• Spontaneous parties are the best parties
• I need more board games in my life
• Writing things down (digitally or on paper) is a great feeling

A reflection upon my life

If you’re reading this post, something has happend either:

• I’ve passed away (gulp)
• Someone is snooping through my tumblr account
• Or I’ve forgotten that I had this scheduled for my birthday (most likely reason)

Kind of a morbid thought, but I want to encapsulate as much of who I am into a blog post as much as possible. 

Today is July 14, 2012, and a Wash U girl passed away for reasons I don’t know yet. I’ve never met this girl, but we have a lot of mutual facebook friends. I don’t know the circumstances, but I felt like I should write something in case anything drastic ever happens to me.

So if you’re reading this, tumblr hasn’t gone out of business or broken down, and the queue system in tumblr happens to work. Nothing is guaranteed, after all.

I just want to talk about who I am today and list off some things I want to do with my life.

Right now, I’m attending Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco to learn how to be a world class beginner web developer. Wow that’s a mouthful. The goal for me isn’t because I have an innate passion for programming. I have an innate passion for starting my own business and just working in the tech industry. I think it’s fascinating that you can build software once and people can access your product anywhere in the world wherever there’s internet. So cool. 

There’s an infinite number of things I could write about now, hopefully some of them are taken care of by past and future blog posts. But just in case I don’t make it to my 22nd birthday, here are some things I want to say:

• Mom and Dad, I love you more than I’ve ever expressed to you before. Even right now, I’m having trouble expressing how much I love you both. Thinking about this has brought me to tears. You have always guided me through the tumultuous roads of life without hesitation and I can’t imagine how I could ever live without your guidance. All I’ve ever needed in life was your love and you’ve given me more than any person deserves. I want to write more, but words escape me right now.
• Leslie, I love you too. We’re not the most outwardly expressive siblings, but I hope you know that I love you more than you know. Please take care of yourself and mom and dad for me. I wish I could be there to help you.

That’s all I have the time/emotional capacity to write right now. To all my friends all over the world, I love you all too. Please take care of each other and my family.  Hopefully I’ll write more later and keep adding to this over time. 

Birthday’s coming up. I’m pushing this post back to 2013…

Pushing this back to 2014

Pushing this back to 2015. Hopefully I can do this for a while. A lot changed in the last two years. In fact, I haven’t really re-read this. But it was a good representation of my feelings at that moment. Ok. Back to life and stuff. Things are pretty great right now.

Pushing this to 2016. 

Denver 2016

I had a pretty spectacular trip to Denver recently with several old friends from college. We live all over the US and it was great that we all managed to get everyone together for five days. 

It all started with a group message back in March that spun out into a whole conversation. We were all excited to possibly meet up, but the location was up for debate. Denver made sense for us because it had a combination of city life and incredible nature that you can’t really get anywhere else. With 2 people from the west coast, 3 people from the east coast, and 1 person in the midwest, Denver seemed like a good destination, especially since none of us had strong ties to it.

Day 0

We all met up on Tuesday night after work in Denver. I took the same flight as Mike Chan since we both live in New York. We were the last to arrive, where Drew and Will were already waiting at the airport for a bit. Mihai and Mike Kovacs came to pick us up in the Ford Explorer. Luckily we got a big car so we could all comfortably sit in our own seats (we actually saw a sedan later in the week with 6 guys sitting in it and thanked our lucky stars that wasn’t us). 

We got to the apartment and immediately went out searching for dinner. It was 10:30 at this point and who knew that most places stopped serving food at this hour! Luckily we found a place (that served chicken and waffles) and chatted for a while. 

We actually went around the table and talked about what each of us had been up to since college. It was a hokey exercise, but it led to some great conversations. We ended up going back to the apartment and chatting until 2am about everything. It was great. 

Day 1 - Food trucks, cornhole, 16th Street Mall, LoDo, Larimer Square

We spent all of the first day walking around downtown Denver. 

There was a food truck festival happening where we got smoothies, root beer floats, and played some cornhole.

I really liked Denver’s downtown area. It felt pretty clean without being eerily clean like DC. There were a lot of new developments that signaled the city is on a strong growth path. It had a lot of modern amenities and beautiful public spaces that made it a great place to hang out.

Day 2 - Red rocks, Mount Evans

This was by far our most adventurous day. We started out by going to red rocks amphitheatre. Unfortunately this was where Mihai’s Miata broke down and we had to take a detour for the day by going to the Mazda dealership. 

We waited around for a bit at the diner and finally were able to get back on track to head to the top of Mount Evans. The drive up Mount Evans was brutal and down was even more harrowing, but the fields all the way up were spectacular. The roads had very sharp turns and there were no guard rails at a certain point up the mountain. Mount Evans is supposedly the highest paved road in North America, so the views were both amazing and terrifying.

My favorite part of the drive up was Summit Lake Park. The ice hadn’t yet melted from the winter and the lake had the most beautiful hues. The were green, blue, yellow and white. It’s my new lock screen. 

Day 3 - Garden of the Gods, Cave of the Winds, The 3 Hour Scenic Route

We were originally going to Pikes Peak on Day 3, but a few people got altitude sickness on Mount Evans. We figured that it’d be a pretty similar experience so we decided to try other things instead. We were pretty bad about planning so we ended up being unable to go the the Olympic Training Center or the Wolf Sanctuary. 

Garden of the Gods was really cool and we probably spent too much time in that area. Cave of the Winds was a small detour on our drive back. We eventually spent about 3 hours on the road on the “scenic route”. It got a little crazy when we took a dirt path for a while and weren’t sure if we were heading the right way. The drive alongside the Platte River was really beautiful though. And the sunset during our drive was incredible.

We got dinner at Acorn at The Source, which reminded me a lot of Bushwick, except there was a parking lot. A lot of young people and interesting dining concepts in an old factory. 

Day 4 - Botanic Gardens and Game of Thrones Board Game

We took it easy on our last full day there. We went to the botanic gardens and eventually spent our evening playing the Game of Thrones board game with a full 6 people. That game has so many rules and can take so much time, but it was great to have everyone together playing it. It’ll probably never happen again since the game takes to much time, but I was really happy we were able to pull it off. The game mirrors the backstabbing and treachery of the show/books so well. 

Day 5 - Goodbyes

We gathered up all our stuff and all caught flights at the airport and returned to our lives. It was so great to see old friends. Although the time was brief, the memories and friendships will last.