Vibe check, July 2026
Blogging consistently is hard. The more I told myself, “I should write another post,” the more it made it weigh more heavily in my head. That paired with the industry-wide changes from AI, I sidelined it for a good while.
There are a number of changes in my life that I’d like to jot down here.
Professionally
The first is that I’ve just joined GitHub as a Staff Design Engineer which I’m quite excited about. Among other things, joining a company I’ve held in high regard for my entire career has a special ring to it. I’m looking forward to becoming more familiar with my team, the company, and doing my best work yet.
The second is the new coat of paint I put together this weekend for my website.
The sakura tree illustration is a vector I drew years ago and thought it’s too pretty to let it keep gathering dust in my Figma drafts. I adjusted light mode’s default background color to #fff7ea, a foggy yellow, which I endearingly named --color-sun. The dark mode counterpart is staying the midnight blue I had it at before.
I then took some extra time to create some new vectors featured in the footer. I wanted something that could give some depth and texture to the site while staying thematically relevant to the sakura branches. After looking up various zen garden inspiration images, I drew some shapes that resemble a Japanese shrine, a moss-covered stone, and rendered them neatly in CSS.
Picking colors took the longest after landing on shapes I was happy with. Something that fit into the new sunny palette while also providing a dark mode counterpart proved difficult since most reference palettes featured strong reds and blues. I’m not formally trained in color theory, but I was able to tweak it to my liking. I wanted a muted palette while adding a lot of color and character to the site.
Personally
I’ve been continuing Mandarin sessions with a tutor and am happy to say that I feel like my comprehension, vocabulary, and confidence in the language is anecdotally up a notch. It helps when my tutor is fun and gives me an avenue to practice speaking in a non-familial context. The sessions are unstructured and it’s really become dedicated weekly time to develop a friendship.
I also started learning Korean. I can only barely string together sentences at this point, but visiting Seoul last year birthed my aspiration to pick up the language. This is also through an in-person tutor which I find to be the most effective method for me to learn a language.
As an Angelino, I’ve grown to be a full-on Dodgers fan this year. I’m watching more games, going to more games, and have learned brand new acronyms like OPS and WHIP. The World Cup is cool, but my heart is in baseball.