I haven’t posted anything in three months. Here’s what happened:

  • Suzi and I spent some good time in Arkansas with family for Kou’s funeral. It was good to see everyone there and to be able to enjoy each other’s company and celebrate Kou’s life together. I was reminded of both the sanctity of life and the imminence of death
  • Church retreat at a giant cabin down by Mt Rainier for 3 days/2 nights. Had a really good time being around everyone and having some really encouraging and vulnerable conversations about how we’ve been doing spiritually. We put like 9 people and a bunch of dishwasher fluid into the hot tub one night
  • I finished reading the Old Testament and finished memorizing Romans 9
  • Suzi and I started attending a more outreach-oriented small group meeting weekly at the University of Washington
  • Ran the Fall City Half Marathon in the rain, 1:33-something to win my age group, but it was an off-day. I wasn’t in a racing mentality that day and it rained pretty heavily for about the last 5 miles. I thought I’d at least break 1:30, so I was a bit disappointed
  • Suzi and I celebrated our anniversary with a day trip down the Oregon coast, then spent a night at a resort in Snoqualmie
  • Released my work on a Chrome extension that evaluates arbitrary JavaScript based on speech commands (using the speech recognition browser API and user-specified regular expressions) - code is here
  • Our church’s basketball team, Panda Express, has been playing in an inter-church league; we’ve been playing pretty well this season and have been able to get everyone involved, as well as win some very close games. The last game of the regular season is tomorrow, then two weeks of playoffs
  • Anthony Chang and my [really simple] iOS app ended up in the Apple Store - Boba Emergency
  • Erik and Jonie’s wedding happened! (Suzi and I were involved with coordination and music respectively, it was an amazing night and such a blessing to celebrate them collectively as a church community)
  • Sam, Micah, Vicky, and I went to an All Sons and Daughters concert in Tacoma
  • At Tune, we were able to increase developer workflow experience with Docker (and docker-osx-dev to get around some file-sync issues); we also started using Redux and consuming it from both Angular and React worlds. We also hosted the React meetup one month and two of my coworkers spoke on lessons they learned from building an internal component library
  • I accepted a job offer from Facebook. If I’m honest, I think this is a really big deal. I have been blessed by God to be able to work alongside, in my opinion, the best web developers on the planet, and to write software that could touch the 1.5 billion or so people who are Facebook users. I need to constantly remind myself not to derive my identity from this. I know what that a loss of humility and meekness will ruin the two things that ultimately matter to me - my relationship with God and my relationship with my wife. I’m thankful for my time at Tune and for having the first opportunity in my career to develop and ship large client-side web applications in cutting-edge technologies while I was there. I really grew up as a web developer at Tune, and I expect to continue to grow and learn more at Facebook

I’ll try to post more frequently since these big gaps in recaps rob me of deeper introspection. This next month, I’ll have two weeks off of work without a bus pass or a laptop, so I’m hoping to spend the mass of my time reading and running and will hopefully get some time to go hiking and to do outreach at UW. I’m trying to enjoy everything that I have right now - I am already starting to miss all of my time at the Tune offices in Belltown and in the upstairs corner of Top Pot.

I’m going to do what I can to run a fast Seattle Marathon at the end of this month as I’ve been training for this for practically a year, and I need this milestone to signal an end to my training. I don’t plan on running or training seriously after this race - I think there are more important things that I should be doing, and trying to get even 40 miles a week ends up taking a lot of time away from other things.

I hope November goes well for me, and for you, the reader. Thanks for reading.