Hey everyone, welcome to Andrew's Place!
This newsletter is a space for me to update my friends, family, and community on my journey through life. Some updates will be sad, others will be joyous, all of them will be personal. Most of the time I'll probably be touching on the same topics: Personal growth, Community, Career, Technology/Software-- if any of these things are important to you, I'm sure you'll enjoy the newsletter.
One of my hopes is for these updates to inspire curiosity and conversation. Please feel free to send me questions or to tell me about your life, I'd love to talk more with each of you.
Some context that you should know about me: I'm 22, I'm a software engineer, and I was a straight-A straight-laced student, but somehow found myself dropping out of university at 20 to join a startup and pursue my dreams of "changing the world". Consequently, I'm actively figuring out what the hell it means to "change the world", but I remain optimistic. If you can help, let me know.
Here's an update on my life:
The Rabbithole (my house)
The Rabbithole is the name of my coliving house in San Francisco. If you haven't heard of coliving before, go read Supernuclear (https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/introducing-supernuclear-a-guide-to-coliving-a6f407933b62). We started in March when COVID just hit: people were fleeing San Francisco, all of our interviews were remote, and we couldn't throw any parties at our awesome new place. Everything sucked -- sourcing roommates was hard, house tensions were high, people were constantly leaving to quarantine elsewhere.
But we pushed through, and now the house is delightful. I love everyone here, and we're all happy to be living with each other through such an isolating era -- we're also more relaxed about seeing a limited number of safe friends. One of the housemates painted a mural on one of our walls just a couple weeks after moving in -- how cool is that?? Things are looking up :)
Culdesac (my employer)
I finally got into a real groove at work, where I'm able to focus on intense productivity each day. It can be hard, because operationally complex problems are exciting from a bird’s eye view, but the tech problems are all about rapid execution of a basic stack. Productivity >>> technical prowess in an operationally complex environment like real-estate.
In effect, this means it's hard to find the day-to-day engineering problems intellectually stimulating. Still, it’s valuable work and only contrived problems are always exciting during execution -- getting things done requires a certain amount of grit to get through the boring parts in search of the exciting parts.
Software
- I wrote about sockets. If you build software and don't know what sockets are, I'd recommend checking it out — you’ll learn something about how the web works.
- I'm learning Elixir, inspired by Phoenix LiveView -- which I think is a cool enough technology to have a shot at changing the web. I'm teaching myself the basics of the language's syntax and stdlib through a great site for code challenges called exercism. Soon, I'll start a full web project in the Phoenix framework, but for now I'm enjoying exploring the language itself. (The pipe operator is incredible!)
- I recently watched this great talk on why mobile web is failing
It made me care even more about performance, and mobile-first web. Perhaps a slight hit against SPAs in favor of a more traditional server-rendered application? Time will tell. Interestingly, Phoenix LiveView is one way to solve these performance problems while maintaining dynamically updated web apps.
In Other News:
Mission Cliffs (my local climbing gym) opened back up, and I couldn't be more excited! I've been neglecting fitness and physical activity during COVID -- it's hard not to, especially if you find most physically demanding activities boring. Climbing was the first sport that I really fell in love with, and it opened me up to the world of fitness -- it's been one of the things I've missed most since the pandemic started.
I've started picking up Piano (again). I'm proud of myself for being consistent with practice -- it's enjoyable to do something every day, it creates a rhythm to life that’s begun to feel comfortable. I'm focusing almost all of my efforts on sight-reading: I sight-read a new beginner piece each day. I'm already improving, and I'm excited to become proficient enough to sight-read pieces I love.
Advice:
I like the idea of including a piece of advice in each newsletter, targeted specifically toward ambitious youth, looking to change the world. We need more of you, don't lose your hopeful spirit.
My advice today is to do whatever it takes to surround yourself with amazing people:
1. Figure out which traits you want to grow in yourself (kindness, honesty, trust, ambition, effectiveness, courage, artistry, happiness -- this list is up to you)
2. Identify somewhere you can be to immerse yourself with people who have those traits
3. If you can't think of a place, create it yourself! (This is why I started a coliving house)
Some specific tactics you might want to try:
- Join a physical commune. You will meet some incredible people along the way. Most coliving houses have clear values written in a house document, make sure to check it out and join a community that shares your values.
- Become a leader in an online community. These days it's easy to find Slack or Discord groups for nearly every profession or interest on the internet. Join a community that inspires you, and participate every day. Be as generative as possible, and try to provide value for others for the sheer joy of it -- your efforts will be noticed.
- Be a social magnet. Host consistent, simple events for awesome people you know. The best social events have a comfortable environment and encourage conversation. This can be hard and scary at first; if you're worried, it helps to team up with one or two friends so you have wider reach. For instance, my partner and I hosted weekly park days on Sunday last year. Some weeks, only 1 or 2 people would show up; other weeks, everyone would be there and it'd feel like a party. The key is to roll with it in both cases -- if people have a great time, they will keep coming back.