This is slightly outdated, so hopefully I don’t let all of my September feelings affect what really happened in August. Honestly, it doesn’t seem like that much happened.

Spirituality

The one huge thing that happened in August was that two of my coworkers actually started coming to church with me. One went to a small group and a few Friday nights and the other came on Sunday mornings (which has never actually happened since I’ve moved to Seattle - no one I’ve invited has ever given up their Sunday morning to come to church with me). Both of them are international students, so they haven’t really grown up in the church and are mostly unfamiliar with the Bible. And each has some weird inclination towards learning more about God and wanting to be a part of our church. Which is awesome. I can explain the gospel through all sorts of different lenses and it is new to them every time.

I gave them Bibles from our church and we started doing Bible studies at work twice a week. Like… out in the open Bible studies, with our other peers walking around and looking at us and overhearing us because we couldn’t get our own meeting rooms. And they didn’t know if it was weird or anything, so they’d leave their Bibles out in the open and talk about stuff to me like it wasn’t culturally taboo (which is exactly how we should talk about it). All of it made me realize how timid I actually was at work in terms of sharing my faith and identifying myself as a Christian who doesn’t just go to church, but wants other people to believe what I believe.

That was very exciting for me. Finally, I felt like I was doing what God wanted me to be doing, and that I had found my niche for being at Tune. Just two days ago, one of the guys came to me and wanted to tell me about something he had read in Matthew 6. He opened his Bible to show it to me and it was actually annotated, with verses like “Seek first the kingdom of God” underlined and notes scribbled in Chinese into the margins. I was floored.

In other spiritual things, I finished reading Romans 1 - 7 for You, by Tim Keller, and picked up Matt Chandler’s To Live is Christ, To Die is Gain, that is a sort of loose commentary on the book of Philippians. I memorized about 80% of Romans 7 (and have finished by the time of this writing), so I need to actually sit down and refresh myself, but theoretically, I should be able to recite Romans 5 - 8.

I stopped teaching children’s Sunday school at church. Our guys’ groups went to a thing called Enigma Studios where they lock you up in a room for an hour and you have to solve all sorts of brainteasers to get the key to leave the room. One of our guys got baptized at our annual Church MusicFest. Suzi and I supported our church’s volleyball team as they participated in a fundraiser tournament called SpikeFest, put on by CSL.

And we had a church retreat in the Packwood/Mt. Rainier area. We had about 18 or so people and stay in a huge cabin with a hot tub, and it was a good, relaxing time away. We didn’t get cell phone service out there, so that helped the disconnection. Honestly, the whole weekend was just kind of meh for me until the car ride back. I was in a car with some very close brothers to me and they gave me some very valuable insight into my life and how I could be growing/maturing in my life right now. It meant a whole lot to me, and if I remember anything about the retreat, it’ll probably be that car ride.

I was also able to start getting into a daily quiet time groove - I’d wake up a little early and go to a Top Pot in Belltown right before I went to work. Honestly, I wasn’t being very consistent before the past two weeks, but things have certainly improved. And I’ve finally made it to Judges, which seems like a whole bunch of action.

Suzi

Suzi and I have been doing pretty well, I think. We’re kind of in a groove, which isn’t exactly indicative of the health of the relationship… we’re mostly staying busy with our respective commitments. Suzi’s been investing in the women’s ministry at our church and continuing to disciple a girl or two and lead a women’s small group. She also helped plan a gender reveal party for our friends’ baby, which involved buying cupcakes with secretly injected blue or pink filling.

We had our first real good date night in a long time for our 2 year anniversary. We went down to Belltown and hung out, ended up at some Korean bistro, then ate at Shiro’s, which is, by some accounts, the best sushi in the Pacific Northwest. We sat at the bar, where the sushi chef just makes stuff right in front of us and then puts individual pieces on our plates every few minutes. Good times, good times.

Work/Programming

Work has been going well. As for Tune, we:

  • announced our Berlin office
  • reaching #5 on the Geekwire 200 list (list of the top Northwest startups) and were the #88 fastest growing private company on the Inc 500 (#1 in Washington)
  • announced our acquisition of MobileDevHQ

As for me personally, ngReact got a nice mention here and passed 300 stars on Github. I also released an article about writing Yo in React and Firebase that ended up receiving a lot of nice press, including getting picked up by JavaScript Weekly. I transitioned to a Front End Infrastructure team at work (compared to working specifically on the MobileAppTracking product), so I actually spent a lot of time trying to learn Go (which is really weird after only writing JavaScript for like a year) and figuring out how Angular and React can work/communicate together.

Other

And that’s it. Nothing else really happened. If you read all of this, thanks a lot for reading!