A Quieter Second Half

We're almost halfway through 2023. In a week I leave Taiwan and move back to San Francisco. It is not a dramatic move, but it changes the shape of the rest of the year. The first half had a lot of movement, with family, travel, experiments, and places I had wanted to revisit. The second half needs fewer logistics, fewer distractions, and more sustained work.

The first half gave me a lot to work with. I got better at full-stack development and shipped several small projects, including side projects and hackathon prototypes. I spent more time with friends, met more people in Taiwan, and had more time with extended family. I also traveled again after a few years when travel felt much more constrained. That made the year feel different than I expected.

It was not the most structured period of time. It gave me movement and a lot of conversation. It also made clear that the exploring has to turn into something concrete.

Moving back to the Bay Area

I've moved enough times to stop believing a move is ever simply right or wrong. A place can be right for one version of your life and wrong for another. It can be good for work and bad for rest. It can be good for a social life and bad for the quiet repetition you need to finish things. The useful question is what a place makes easy to repeat.

For me, the Bay Area makes it easier to build. Part of that is personal. I grew up there, went to school there, and I don't spend much energy decoding the place. Part of it is cultural. Paul Graham has an essay I love, Cities and Ambition, about the messages different cities send to the people who live there. The Bay has a high tolerance for people who spend too much time on narrow problems. It also tolerates people who talk seriously about half-formed ideas before those ideas make sense to anyone else. That culture has obvious downsides, but for what I want next, the tradeoff seems worth it.

I'm not moving back because I think the Bay Area is especially livable or romantic. It is expensive and uneven, and I would not recommend it to anyone without a list of caveats. I am moving back because daily life takes less effort in a place I already know. Proximity still matters for certain kinds of work. I want less novelty in the environment so I can spend more attention on the work.

I also want to understand a place I know well from a different point in my life. The Bay Area I left as a student is not the same place I am returning to. I am not the same person either. So the move is really a test of whether an old environment can support a new set of priorities.

I often say that I dislike change, but that is not quite right. I dislike the inconvenience around it: the packing, the logistics, the unfamiliar routines, and the stretch when everything takes slightly more effort than it should. But I also seem to choose change whenever the current setup makes my life too automatic. Moving doesn't solve that. It does interrupt the defaults long enough to show me which habits I chose and which ones I fell into.

What I want from the rest of 2023

The rest of the year is about doing more with the ideas I have collected. I have kept a running note of project ideas since 2017. Some are outdated now, other people have built some of them well, and some were never good ideas. The note is evidence that the impulse has been consistent. I have always liked turning observations into small experiments. I have never been short on ideas. The hard part is deciding which ones deserve sustained attention.

That means getting better at the middle part of building, after the fun beginning and before anything feels done. The harder work is to narrow scope, make prototypes, show them to people, and decide what to keep. I want to reach that point faster. I also want to explain what I am doing before it is fully formed. Fuzzy communication usually means the idea itself is still fuzzy.

The boring parts are easy to overlook. Health, routine, exercise, and sleep set the limits of the work. Intensity carried the first half of the year. I want the next six months to run on routine, so I can keep going after the initial motivation wears off.

By the end of the year, I want one usable product that a few people actually use or ask more from. I also want a few prototypes that clarified what not to build, and a more consistent writing habit. Those are modest goals, but they are concrete enough to judge. They would also show that I finish more of what I start.

What I am paying attention to in tech

A few areas keep pulling my attention, because they overlap with what I might want to build. The first is testing and developer tooling. A lot of developer infrastructure has improved quickly, but testing still feels more painful than it should. It is necessary work, and it is usually slow and unrewarding to write. Better tools could make tests faster, more reliable, and easier to read when they fail. Then teams could move faster without trusting broken tests.

The second is data privacy and security, especially around AI products. More tools ask for more personal context, and the boundaries are still underdefined. People now give new products access to sensitive data in exchange for convenience, personalization, or novelty. That may be rational in some cases, but it creates unresolved questions around storage, permissions, trust, and regulation. I expect this to matter more as AI tools become part of daily workflows.

The third is cloud development environments. It feels harder than it should to make local development match production. Preview environments, branch-based databases, and cloud-native workflows all point the same direction. Development moves into environments that look much closer to production. More of the time then goes into testing actual behavior instead of fighting setup.

I am also interested in practical software with more care in the interface. Products like Linear and Vercel are good reminders that developer tools do not have to feel interchangeable. Good interfaces make tools easier to trust and easier to come back to.

None of this is a roadmap yet. These are the areas where I keep noticing problems. That has usually been where my better project ideas start.

Closing

I want to write more about my time in Taiwan, but that deserves its own piece. The next six months have far fewer flights in them. That should make it easier to get to.