What I'm doing now

Updated November 17th, 2024, from my apartment in Saigon.

Pumping Iron

For the first time in my life I have a personal trainer. I meet Diego three times a week and I feel like it’s the beginning of a transformation for me health-wise. I’ve always avoided a gym and more generally any form of exercise that feels like a chore. My philosophy is that getting stronger and healthier should be a byproduct of something enjoyable, like hiking in a beautiful redwood forest. What makes having a PT such a game changer is that all you need to do is show up, plus the accountability of having to meet someone. Diego is a pro and knows how to keep pushing me just to the limit and a little beyond. I’m excited to see where this goes.

Working as an independent dev is better than being on a team

One huge lesson I’ve learned in my career is that as a developer is it’s essential for me to own my own code. Pull requests are my nightmare because all we as developers seem to do is argue over formatting, what this function should be named, or what file it should be in... it’s truly soul crushing. We should each just worry about getting our own code shipped and then communicate with other devs' services through an API.

Staying on the current trajectory

It been on the same trajectory for 7 years now - mainly living abroad, being single, saving money, having fun, being utterly free and independent and untied. But now what? What if I did the opposite? My reasoning is I want to live a full life and not just stay in one niche forever and stop growing. I’ve been having these thoughts for a long time but haven’t changed course because it’s not obvious to me what would be better… but maybe that’s the point? There’s nothing left to optimize. I won the game. Maybe it’s time to de-optimize and make some bad decisions.

Getting back into cooking

One of the exciting things about living in Vietnam is access to so many high quality raw ingredients and commodities. This fact combined with that fact that since I’ve been here that availability of high quality imported food has increased noticeably is making cooking at home very exciting again. There’s hardly any brand or ingredient I cannot buy here and it definitely wasn’t like this when I came in 2018. I’m enjoying the added control I have over ingredient quality, portion size, and nutrition that comes from preparing my own meals at home. Also thanks to Zac B I recently started ordering direct from a farm in the the highlands called Thien Sinh.