Vibe check, November 2025

It's been half a year since I've written anything on this blog. Time is passing by faster every day, and I'm reminded by John Mayer's lyrics from Stop This Train:

Stop this train
I wanna get off
And go home again
I can't take the speed
It's movin' in
I know I can't
But honestly
Won't someone stop this train?

I'm now solidly in my mid-30s. My body loudly reminds me of its mortality through lower back pain. I thought it was sciatica; turns out it's arthritis. All those years of poring over lines of code didn't do my back any favors, but this led me to give tai chi a serious try, and that's been a delight.

I've been learning how to attune to myself better. When I feel some spidey sense tingling, I don't just bottle it up and throw it into the sea of my subconscious anymore. I've been learning how to identify what it is. Happiness, sadness, anger, serenity, shame, apprehension. I'm learning how to listen to and trust my emotions for the first time since I've thrown that all out in my childhood. My incredible therapist has been a guiding compass for me, and I can't thank her enough.

I used to identify strongly as a certain type of technologist: a Rails developer who strives for open, empathetic software. I've since loosened that a bit. I'm just someone who wants to help people, and that can take so many different shapes. The last time I wrote in Rails professionally was over 5 years ago, and being away from the ecosystem has made me come to terms with things like:

• Tooling that comes out of the box without convention over configuration is just fine, actually. It invites collaboration with your team to develop your own conventions that works best for you all.
• Omakase-less development is good, actually. It forces deliberate decision-making for the tooling that you do use, and it allows you to decide together. When you're in charge of implementing a new abstraction layer, you're writing code specifically for your team, and what an amazing avenue to practice empathy that is.
• I'm grateful that Hamburger Helper helped me truly learn full-stack development, but the brain worms have since taken over.

Being relentless about choosing technologies was also so tiring. I used to run flavors of desktop Linux on a Dell XPS 13 in the spirit of only running open software. I then transitioned to a Silicon Mac running Asahi Linux because the hardware was great, but I still only wanted to run open software. Now I'm just running macOS on the same machine. I think past me would've yelled out, "But this isn't running open and ethical software!" I was a little too idealistic and dogmatic. There's no pragmatic end to this line of thought. Instead of being sucked into the void that'll eventually lead to something like trying to consider how the physical materials of my transistors were sourced or if a threat actor tampered with the network drivers of my device, I'm just choosing to use a readily available tool that enables me to build, collaborate, and connect.

I'm learning how to choose my battles and know my own limits.