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2022 in review

2023 January

See 2021 in review to see my goals/thoughts for last year.

2022 Goals: A Review

✅ Run a half-marathon.

I'm proud that I was able to do this, given that I was not in good shape heading into last January. I've documented the journey fairly extensively here.

I'm disappointed that I didn't continue running regularly afterwards, but alas, life had other plans for me. Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze more runs in this year!

❌ Write + publish at least once a month.

Unsurprisingly, I failed to hit this goal (for the second year in a row). I published 7 times this year which is the furthest that I've made it, but I won't be renewing this challenge for 2023. I want to continue writing and documenting my thoughts in public, but I don't think setting a numeric goal is the right way to encourage this.

✅ Read 25 books this year.

I barely made it to the finish line this year. I had some favorites, though:

  • A Little Life
    • Brutal and heartbreaking, this book is the among the best fiction I've read in my life. Not for the faint of heart.
  • Our Missing Hearts
    • Celeste Ng is a remarkable writer – I loved this book because the themes hit home for me. It's an opinionated commentary on the state of the world and the characters shine throughout.
  • The Upside of Stress
    • This reads like a classic self-help book (not in a good way – self help books suffer from being long & didactic), but I found the underlying message compelling. Stress is often unavoidable, but your attitude toward it can make all the difference.

✅ A Few Personal Goals...

I had three personal goals (sorry friends, these are for my eyes only). I made serious progress on goal one and three, and generally hit goal two, so I'm going to chalk all three of these as successes.

Some Thoughts on 2022

All things considered, 2022 was one of the most eventful years of my life. I've documented certain parts earlier (here, there, and others), but here's a quick TLDR of notable events:

  • Ran a half-marathon
  • Shipped Ramp Flex as one of three founding engineers (see launch post)
  • Left Ramp (additionally shipped the most code at Ramp during my tenure, which I'm proud of)
  • Participated in the inaugural Sequoia Arc program

Despite all of the chaos and the uncertainty that starting a company brings, I'm proud of how the year went.

In 2020, as my #1 goal, I wrote:

Find clarity on what I want to work on in 2022. I know this is vague, but I want to take the time to find conviction in where my career is heading.

In 2021, I wrote:

I felt disillusioned working at Facebook. It was hard for me to believe that my work made a positive impact on society or that working at Facebook was the best use of my talent. The compensation, perks, and brilliant coworkers all sugarcoated the truth that no one at Facebook fully believed that they were achieving the vision of "making the world more open and connected". Overall, my time at Facebook reminds me of an essay I wrote while still in college.

I switched companies and joined Ramp in October, and it's been an amazing two months so far. The engineering talent is phenomenal, and being part of this all-star team reminds me of my time on Cornell AppDev. I remember people on AppDev always lamented "I wish we could just start an AppDev company after graduation instead of joining [Company]", but Ramp has come pretty close (and in some ways surpassed!) my vision of what that might look like.

In 2022, I think I've taken this philosophy to the logical extreme, in a way that my younger selves would be happy with. No matter the outcome the company has, I'd like to put on the record that I have no regrets about venturing down this path.

2023 Goals

  1. Find clarity on what to work on.
    Funnily enough, this is a callback to my 2020 goal. There's some irony in the fact that after you make the difficult decision of pursuing your own dreams, you then have to make the more difficult decision of which dream is worth pursuing.

    Starting a company, especially VC-backed, is unfortunately rooted in realism. For any dream we might desire to pursue, there's an omnipresent reminder that it needs to be a viable business. We're looking for something at the intersection of idealism and reality (sorry, I know this is corny) – but we'll see how it goes.

  2. Wake up earlier (concretely, at or before 8:30AM).
    The first essay I ever published was about the importance of sleep, so this is another goal rooted in the past. I've been sleeping around 9-9.5 hours over the last year, and I don't think this is because I need to sleep so much, but more so because it's just become a habit. I think sleeping less shouldn't affect my health, but will buy me more time in the day.

  3. Manage my time better.
    This goal isn't as measurable, but I want to be better about where I spend my time. Once work picks up I'll be much more busy with work-related tasks, but I want to be more intentional about what I get done on a day-to-day basis.

  4. A few personal goals. A bit like last year, we'll see if/when I choose to reveal these – but fingers crossed, these will go as well as they went in 2022!