The decade at a glance

• 2016
  

  Houston liberal-arts grad. Move to California with Kailin. Coding bootcamp (MakerSquare / Hack Reactor). Land a $120k job at Electric Imp. Break up with Kailin. Went from ~40k to 120k in a single year. Broke the whole way, in debt, but transformed.

• 2017
  

  Mountain View, Electric Imp. Buy the SV650. First Japan trip. Meet Tammy. A comical amount of dating, then the choice to invest in one person. Concerts, camping, new friends (Christa, Kristin, Alex, Abby). Overspent hard.

• 2018
  

  LASIK. Move to SF with Gino. Drums. Japan with Tammy. A car accident I witnessed cracked something open — depression arrived. Nearly got Google, got rejected, left Electric Imp.

• 2019
  

  Head-down at "Potato." A blur of travel — France twice, Taiwan, Paris, NYC, Michelin dinners. Moved to the Mission. (Never filled out the reflection pages — the calendar was the year.)

• 2020
  

  The pandemic year. Back in Houston with family, got close to them again. Setbacks at work but working from home was good. Music production, running, the OP-Z. A held breath.

• 2021
  

  Moved to Taiwan with Tammy. Curative ("best job ever"). Turned 30. Meditated every day. Made more friends than I dreamed of (Beacons of Gondor, g0v, Crossroads). Got Richard the lizard. GME. "Forming the Perfect Life in Taiwan."

• 2022
  

  The Cofactr contract made me an architect and lead — and 508.dev was born. Europe, Mexico, Hawaii, Japan. Couples therapy taught me I have needs. Photography took over. Met Audrey Tang. Got sued over an article. "Dense. Successful. Fun."

• 2023
  

  508 popped off. Opened a restaurant (the ji spot). Proposed to Tammy at Yehliu. Aunt Sara's diagnosis. Qing's death. Riley's wedding. So much death, stress, and growth at once. "what is even going on."

• 2024
  

  The restaurant ground me down; I closed it. My parents moved to Taiwan. Richard died. Aunt Sara died. Landed ReactWise the week the restaurant closed. Analog revival — fountain pens, the Long Now, rereading Anathem. "Doing Too Much."

• 2025
  

  Best job ever, all year — lost at the end. Wedding venue chosen. Discovered I actually love lifting. A massive year of self-excavation (Trilium, Hobonichi, the ADHD book). Hit by a car twice. Decided to bet on myself. "Educational. Reflective. Complex."

This is what my last ten years were about

• Personal life, family
  

  The spine of the whole decade is Tammy. Met her on a motorcycle-and-pho night in May 2017 and spent nine years turning a casual thing into first love, into living together across an ocean, into couples therapy, into a proposal, into a wedding now weeks away. The early years were a parade of women and a guy who was careless with hearts (Kailin, the anime girl, Abby); watching myself learn — with therapy, with the 2022 breakthrough that my feelings are valid and Tammy can handle hearing them — is the quietest and biggest story in here.

  The family arc inverts completely. 2016: dissociated from aging parents who wouldn't eat carbs. 2024: they move to Taiwan to be near me. That is a life reorganizing itself around me.

• Career, studies
  

  A near-perfect hero's-journey shape. Terrified bootcamp applicant who failed his first interview on map/reduce/filter → front-end engineer → Electric Imp → Potato → almost Google → remote-from-Taiwan at Curative → founder of a co-op → contract architect → restaurateur → real full-time engineer → deciding to strike out on my own. The wild part: the imposter syndrome never fully left, even as the evidence against it stacked to the ceiling. By 2025 I could say "I'm probably capable of basically anything given enough time" — and I'd earned every word.

• Friends, community
  

  From "didn't make any new friends after the new job" (2016) to a massive Taiwan groupchat of people down to do anything. g0v, Crossroads, the whole engineer- knowhow community I built. And a political drift from apolitical SF techie to committed anarchist/communist organizer — pedestrian rights, the Cone Club, the recurring dream of a commune.

• Relaxation, hobbies, creativity
  

  The through-lines: motorcycling, photography, the homelab/self-hosting obsession, voracious reading (Stormlight, Abercrombie, Robin Hobb, Le Guin, Neal Stephenson), baking for crowds, split keyboards built by hand, journaling in every format ever invented. The "creativity" I listed as an aspiration for nine straight years — drums, music, writing — finally started becoming real at the end.

• Physical health, fitness
  

  The great "unfinished" quest — except hindsight rewrites it. Every single year, 2016 through 2025, contains "this is the year I finally lose the weight." the SF numbers (158-172) , and I looked totally fine — just softer than I wanted. A bit more lifting and I'd have looked great. it's a decade of being harder on myself than the mirror deserved. And 2025 ends on the first genuinely new note: I discovered I actually LIKE lifting.

• Mental health, self-knowledge
  

  A decade of tinkering — ADHD, bupropion, ritalin, meditation I always wished I did more of, death anxiety, depressive slumps. Braided with a genuine transformation of character: the 2016 guy called himself "a dick" who "condescends"; the 2025 guy runs daily energy audits and is learning to feel.

• Habits that define me
  

  Journaling (this document, org-mode, org-roam, Hobonichi, Trilium), meditation, stretching, Mandarin flashcards, motorcycling, tinkering with tech, compulsively organizing people and events, and "casting votes for the person I want to be."

• A better tomorrow
  

  Built 508 into something that got real people out from under bad jobs and into higher salaries. g0v, Crossroads, pedestrian-rights filming, the Cone Club.

Six sentences about my past decade

• The wisest decision I made…
  

  Attending that bootcamp in 2016. Everything — the money, Tammy, Taiwan, 508 — cascades from that one door.

• The biggest lesson I learned…
  

  My capabilities aren't hardcoded. Said it about math in Taiwan, about code in the bootcamp, about lifting in 2025 — the same discovery, re-earned every few years: I can do the thing I assumed I couldn't.

• The biggest risk I took…
  

  Moving to Taiwan in the middle of a pandemic. (Runner-up: opening a restaurant while running an agency and holding a contract job.)

• The biggest surprise of the decade…
  

  That I'd end up an anarchist restaurateur-engineer-organizer in Taipei with my parents living down the road — when the decade opened with me alone, eating pizza and watching cop movies on New Year's in San Francisco.

• The most important thing I did for others…
  

  Built 508 into something that freed real people from bad jobs. (And every trip, party, and food camp I compulsively organized so other people could have a good time.)

• The biggest thing I completed…
  

  Cofactr / 508 — proving I'm not "a copy-paste coder" but someone who can architect a thing from nothing and lead people to build it.

The best moments

Three of my biggest accomplishments

• The list
  
  1. Building 508.dev from a placeholder EIN into a co-op that employs people.
  2. The move to Taiwan and the whole life built on top of it.
  3. Becoming someone Tammy could marry — the emotional work, the therapy, the proposal.
• What did I do to achieve these?
  

  Got organized. Kept putting myself out there. Committed fully instead of hedging. Stuck to habits. Trusted people enough to delegate, and myself enough to lead.

• Who helped?
  

  Tammy, first and most, at every step. Riley (Cofactr, the AI-tools kick in the butt). Michael Wu (508's growth). The therapists. And the whole Taiwan crew that made a foreign country feel like home.

Three of my biggest challenges

• The list
  
  1. The restaurant — combined with an agency and a contract job at the same time.
  2. The pile-up year: closing the restaurant, both parents moving in, Richard and Aunt Sara dying, a brutal job market, all at once (2024).
  3. Nine years of being at war with my own discipline, focus, and body.
• Who or what helped me overcome these?
  

  Tammy carrying more than her share. Delegating once I got a hold of people. AI tools. The Trilium/Hobonichi system that finally gave the ADHD something to hold onto. And time — the thing that keeps proving I'm more capable than I fear.

• What did I learn about myself?
  

  I don't crack under pressure anymore. I'm a good leader and a real engineer. I have limited energy and I have to say no. And I was never actually failing — I was just narrating a success story as a shortfall.

Forgiveness

Letting go

The past decade in three words

The book of my past decade

Goodbye to the decade