Vibe check, April 2025

It's a sunny Sunday in SoCal. I'm sitting on a dark rattan chair right outside a local coffee shop with my laptop on my lap, as its namesake intended, angling away from the rays. There's a slight breeze and I'm watching the leaves of a nearby tree quietly dance. There's been quite a bit of change in my life as of late and felt I haven't had a chance to process it all due to being in go-go-go mode. This is me slowing down and organizing my thoughts & feelings in writing.

On the career front, I "graduated" from Atomic, a Silicon Valley venture studio, to be a full-time employee of Elly, one of its portfolio companies. I was at Atomic for almost 4 years, the second longest time I've stayed at one company. I ended up making the jump for a few reasons, but the biggest amongst them was that I really like the team. At Atomic, one of my responsibilities included augmenting engineering teams of portfolio companies, and I've been helping build Elly's product as well as engineering team for almost two years. That was more than enough time for me to decide to want to join full-time.

Elly is built on a tech stack that I've traditionally shied away from: full-stack, serverless TypeScript. As someone who has preferred to stay in the Ruby ecosystem as much as possible, I'd imagine past me would be shocked at this transition, but it's the people that I work with that matter the most. I don't want this post to become a technical one so I'll spare the details for now, but the way ES6 enables having small, modular files with its associated tests sitting alongside them is also really quite nice.

On the personal front, I moved back closer to LA proper after being on its outskirts for a couple years. There really is something for everyone here. When friends tell me that they don't like LA, I tend to believe it's only because they haven't found their community in the city yet. As an Asian American third culture kid who has lived in less diverse places, it's comforting to live somewhere where a vast variety of cuisines are a short drive away and I have the opportunity to practice multiple languages. I'd love to find a Mandarin as well as Japanese tutor so I can be at least business-level in both. I'm natively conversational, but my vocabulary is sorely, sorely lacking.

I also started taking Brazilian jiu-jitsu & MMA classes. I've never practiced martial arts before, so this has been a breath of fresh air. I wanted a way to stay active while learning a new skill, so why not self-defense? It's been challenging, an amazing workout, and a great way to build community.

As for everything else going on in the world, all I can really say is I'm worried. The US is leaning heavily fascist, we're at a point where open corruption is seemingly without consequences, there are multiple military conflicts occurring outside the borders, and international relations seem generally shaky.

I realize having this small corner of the Internet isn't much, but I love it as my outlet. I migrated it from Jekyll to Nuxt and also from GitHub Pages to Netlify. The title of this post is inspired by Dave Rupert's blog.

I'd love to write more frequently here.