NOW: Early 2024

I just got back from my grand Japan + South Korea + Taiwan + Hong Kong + Shenzhen + Indonesia + Singapore graduation trip that preceded the start of my job in Feb. It will take many blogposts to cover that trip!

I’ve been trying to find ways to pass the time during my long commute to work. My solution has been to listen to extremely long audio books, each one spanning multiple weeks as I only listen to them on my commute. I’ve been working through Neal Stephenson and have completed Snowcrash and Diamond Age. I found both to be celebration of hacker culture and the hacker ethos, something that I heavily identify with. Both books celebrated and rewarded characters for being willing to break outside their system, one with the title of earth’s hero and the other with an army of small children?

Amidst that, I have moved into my new apartment, having transferred my 8 maps with me. You can read about that here. I’ve found my element in my new apartment design and I’m continuing to develop new kinds of decor and entertainment that should serve to both improve my personal experience but also the experience of any guests I host. I’ve already set up a dart board and an SNES setup, with an interesting visualization in development as well.

In March I attended SCaLE 22x and presented a talk intended to bridge my interest in reverse engineering to my experience designing APIs, arguing that creating custom clients and scraping a service may be your users trying to get more out of your service. A lot of audience members found the talk intriguing, having expected most "hackers" to be adversaries rather than additional users of your service with different ideas and usecases. While that description does not apply to some hackers it applies to the kind of hacking I do and am familiar with. A further description can be found on the SCaLE website.

I’m working on a new reverse engineering project I’ll announce this year, with a cool consumer app that should help some people.

I’m busier than I’ve ever been but also as relaxed as ever, that sort of balance fits me very well. Going into summer most of my friends are now graduating so it remains to be seen what kinds of events lie in my future.