Here is my 2019 year in review! I lost weight, struggled with sleep, grew professionally, struggled with some personal challenges, took some much-needed vacations, and worked hard on side projects.

Health

I lost over 20 pounds in 2019. I started the year at 223.2 lbs and ended at 201.0 lbs. I dropped as low as 189. But I achieved this with a strict diet. I ate mostly fruits, vegetables, cheese, nuts, and lean meats. These are delicious, but I missed the satisfaction of eating a bagel or a slice of pizza every now and then. When I started enjoying food again, I slowly gained 10 pound back.

I’m looking for a sustainable solution. At the moment, I’m trying 16/8 intermittent fasting with calorie counting. I have failed to do each of these individually. Unrestricted intermittent fasting didn’t limit my calories enough. I also feel hungry when I count calories across a full day. But I’m optimistic about the combination. I can eat a huge breakfast and still have enough calorie budget for a healthy and filling dinner. Alternatively, I can stick to salads, nuts, and cheeses in the afternoon so that I can enjoy myself later.

Sleep was rough. I had a prolonged bout of insomnia that stretched from February into July. I would fall asleep easily at midnight. I would then wake up between 4:30 or 5:30. Insomnia sucks. It affects everything. I produced less at work, I was meaner, I was less happy, my chores fall by the wayside. I saw a sleep therapist and she provided a list of recommendations: wear orange-colored goggles at night to limit blue light exposure. Limit caffeine. Get as much sunlight as possible before 8:30am. Have a consistent sleep schedule. Don’t eat, exercise, or shower within 3 hours of going to sleep.

I applied these techniques and shifted my wake time from 8 to 7, and this helped. I still wake in the middle of the night. But I can go back to sleep now. I can be less militant about sleep hygiene by picking my battles. I limit caffeine, keep a strict schedule, and go for a walk before 8:00 every morning. The other changes didn’t matter as much.

This required sacrifices. My friends prefer hanging out late. For years I had considered moving my sleep schedule earlier. But I can’t “just make it up” on the weekends. The opposite is true – staying out once or twice a week can ruin a whole week of regular sleep for me. So I always tended to keep my schedule later to match that of my friends. But the severity of my insomnia bout made me reconsider this. So I leave our plans early on a weekly basis, which is awkward. I’m not sure how this will play out in the long run.

Career

I had a productive year.

My time was split between three things: API stabilization, API support, and GraphQL.

I spent the year working on the API platform team. We worked with a more senior engineer who had helped write broad swaths of our product stack. He successfully pitched the existence of the API platform team, and spent time ramping us up. This was mostly positive. He used his experience to select high-impact projects that helped me learn. We spent a bunch of time cleaning up the user experience and the code, and we ended up with a stabler, cleaner, and faster API. His feedback was always invaluable, and he also made a major contribution to the internals during this time. On the other hand, the downsides to working under him were unusual. He wasn’t officially on the team, but he wasn’t NOT on the team. This created lots of coordination problems. I did discuss this with my manager, but in retrospect I could have handled the situation better by getting everyone to agree to fill out a RACI matrix (or similar). He left Etsy halfway through the year. By that point we knew enough to stand on our own legs, and the team had a fairly successful year.

Supporting the internal API took lots of my team’s time. Etsy is a PHP shop. PHP is single-threaded. An easy way to parallelize computation is to distribute I/O requests among cURL requests. This system is called the “internal API” at Etsy. This means that hundreds of engineers use the internal API. This means that lots of people need help. This version of the API has lasted 5+ years and has advanced users through the company. However, this means that the problems that we hear about are often complex multi-system problems. It’s amazing how many different ways the same metaproblem emerges: “This code was written on the assumption that it would only run on one machine, and now it’s running on two.”

I spent the year planning and prototyping GraphQL at Etsy. This was more solitary than I would like, but it was driven out of necessity. The surface area of our team is so broad. The whole company runs on APIs, and there were just 3 of us for much of the year. The only way that we could move forward was by divide-and-conquer. A second engineer, Kaley Sullivan, did work on it once I started prototyping. She kicked ass – she is a powerhouse engineer and gave me some great feedback on designs. The prototype that we wrote was a success, and we’re moving forward with introducing it at the beginning of next year. In the next year, my challenges will be around growing and evolving GraphQL at Etsy such that it doesn’t rely on me anymore.

I was promoted to Staff Engineer at the beginning of the year. This was an important milestone for me to hit. I didn’t care about the title, but I wanted to prove to myself that I was growing as an engineer. A major reason I joined Etsy was because I love the mission – lots of sellers from all around the world making money. It’s far more palatable than padding a tech billionaire’s pockets by making $cog a little more efficient. Reaching Staff Engineer meant that I’ve been growing my engineering effectiveness, which means that I’ve been more effective at helping our sellers. But now I have access to opportunities that I didn’t as a senior engineer: I emceed our engineering all-hands, I’m leading a working group, and I am in a regular meeting with directors and the CTO. It almost feels like a virtuous cycle: once I reached a certain threshold, it became easier for me to keep getting high-impact or high-visibility work. In 2020, I’d like to use my position to effect positive change, which I did in 2019 but not enough.

I attended a software engineering conference for the first time: GraphQL Summit in San Francisco. I was pleasantly surprised about how useful it was. Reading the presentations was helpful – I did a deep dive on industry writing about GraphQL, but some of the most valuable lessons came from some of the smaller talks. One fact amazed me: literally half of the attendees didn’t even use it. They sent their engineers to this conference to learn more. It stands to reason: of course companies would spend thousands of dollars speculatively to avoid mistakes that would cost them millions. But it doesn’t occur to me that I could get these opportunities myself, and I don’t have a lot of more-senior mentors in my life that can point me in these directions.

Personal life

My year had some ups and downs.

I had a dog at the beginning of the year, Rupert. I don’t have him anymore. The rescue gave him to me because he was high-energy, but I didn’t fully understand what this meant. He could run for an hour in the morning, and be back to 100% at the end of the day. I also didn’t understand that active dogs have active minds. He’d get bored and destructive when I left him alone for a normal work day. He destroyed thousands of dollars worth of stuff in my apartment. This included some things that were irreplaceable. He loved daycare, but he got depressed and distressed if I took him too many days in a row. I worked with a trainer a bunch, and on the first lesson she warned me, “most single owners who have dogs that are this energetic eventually give them away. I often advise people to do this. It’s okay if you do.” Eventually, I came to the conclusion that she was right and he would be better off with another owner. I returned him to the rescue who found him another loving family. This is very hard to write now. I miss him. But it was unsustainable. One of my close friends was very unsupportive of me during this time, which damaged our friendship. I regret this.

My girlfriend and I went on some trips together: a long weekend in Montreal, a week in Vancouver, and 2 weeks in France. I hadn’t traveled internationally in a few years, and it was fun to go on an adventure together. It was also the first time in a long time that I managed to fully disconnect from work. The stories that we got together were wonderful: the meals we had, the places we stayed, the time that we were defeated by the rocky shores of Nice, the time I doused myself in diesel gasoline in Avignon, the delicious fruit varieties you’ve never seen before. It’s also nice to share that with someone.

I started trying to “learn about business” in the beginning of 2019. I was wondering if I could make and sell bar trivia. But a landing page that I set up with a Squarespace domain didn’t convert into any purchases, even though I got a bunch of clicks. Around this time, I was in the middle of having major problems with my dog, and I gave up working on business stuff to take him to the dog park every morning for an hour. After this, I never got back to it.

I tried to learn French. I got a fair bit of vocabulary, but I made very little progress with listening to it, despite taking French classes, practicing for over an hour every day, and listening to 100+ hours of French learning podcasts. My girlfriend is a French translator who speaks it fluently. I thought this fact would help me. This was part of the reason I chose French. But I was so remedial that we never found a middle ground that wasn’t frustrating for me. Actually going to France was fun – I had some basic transactional conversations with shopkeepers. I could also read menus and order and comprehend most of the posted advertisements around the country. But it helped underscore that I would likely never use French in a serious way – if I had picked Spanish, I’d at least have the benefit of seeing it around New York. And I don’t find French culture or history particularly interesting. It was a long and frustrating process for something that would never have an upside.

Eventually, I stopped spending my mornings studying French and started studying machine learning. Machine learning has interested me a few times over the years, most specifically around the time of the Netflix Prize. Most recently, I’ve spent 1.5 hours every morning learning about machine learning. This has been fun so far. So far, I’ve written a backpropagation algorithm in Numpy, and I’ve been working at the Titanic Kaggle competition. My first submission was yesterday, and it performed worse than the naive approach of estimating whether all the women survived and all the men died, haha. But there is a whole forum filled with people who have helpful suggestions of how to perform feature selection, and there’s a whole Internet of helpful materials. I’d like to learn more about real-world data processing, different neural network architectures, and autoencoders.

I’ve been writing more in 2019. This is perpetually a goal of mine, so I’m glad that I’m finally making room for it. I started a “Simple software engineering” series where I examine the tradeoffs that I make when I write software. I also found it helpful to keep a “knowledge base” in WordPress, where I record things that I learn as I learn them. There’s only a loose organization so far, but I’ve only been keeping the knowledge base for about 3 months.

Conclusion

I had a good 2019 despite some personal challenges. My year went really well professionally, and I took some much-needed breaks that I hadn’t really granted myself. I’d like to focus a little more on friendships in 2020, but it’s not clear if that means old friendships or new friendships.