A Quieter Second Half

We're almost halfway through 2023, and in a week I'm leaving Taiwan and moving 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 of the year gave me a lot to work with. I got better at full-stack development and shipped several small projects, including side projects and hackathon-style 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 where travel felt much more constrained, which made the year feel different than I expected.

It was not the most structured period of time. It gave me movement, conversation, and context. It also made clear that exploration has to become more concrete.

Moving Back to the Bay Area

I've moved enough times now to not believe in the idea that a move is ever only "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, good for novelty and bad for consistency, good for social life and bad for the quiet repetition required to finish things. The better question is not whether a place is ideal, but what it makes easier to repeat.

For me, the Bay Area makes building easier. Part of that is personal. I grew up there, went to school there, and understand the area without having to spend much energy decoding it. 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 want to spend too much time on narrow problems, build odd things, or talk seriously about work-in-progress ideas before they 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, uneven, and difficult to recommend without caveats. I am moving back because daily life takes less effort in a place I already know, and proximity still matters for certain kinds of work. The tradeoff is not perfect, but it is clear. 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 or early-career version of myself is not the same place I am returning to, and I am not returning as the same person either. That difference makes the move less like going back and more like seeing 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 change, including packing, logistics, unfamiliar routines, and the period when everything takes slightly more effort than it should. But I also seem to choose change whenever the current setup starts to make my life too automatic. Moving doesn't solve that, but it does interrupt the defaults long enough to see which habits I chose and which ones I just fell into.

What I Want From the Rest of 2023

The rest of the year is about doing more with the ideas I have been collecting. I have kept a running note of project ideas since 2017. Some are outdated now, some have been built well by other people, 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. The problem is not a lack of ideas. It 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 narrowing scope, making prototypes, showing them to people, and deciding what to keep. I want to get faster at getting to that point. I also want to get better at explaining what I am doing before it is fully formed, since fuzzy communication usually means the idea itself is still fuzzy.

The boring parts are easy to overlook. Health, routine, exercise, and sleep are not separate from the work. They set the limits of the work. I don't want the next six months to rely only on intensity. I want them to be steady enough that I can keep going after the initial motivation wears off.

By the end of the year, a good outcome would be one usable product with a few people using it or asking for more, 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 be judged. They would also show that I am getting better at finishing more of the things I start.

What I Am Paying Attention to in Tech

A few areas keep pulling my attention because they overlap with the kinds of things 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, important work, but often slow, brittle, and unrewarding to write. If better tools can make testing faster, more reliable, or easier to understand when tests fail, teams can move faster without trusting broken tests.

The second is data privacy and security, especially around AI products. More tools are asking for more personal context, and the boundaries are still underdefined. People are becoming comfortable giving 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 toward a future where development happens in environments that look much closer to the real thing. Less time fighting setup, more time testing actual behavior.

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.

These are not a roadmap yet. They are areas where I keep noticing problems, and that is usually where the better project ideas start.

Closing

The second half of the year should be quieter. Less travel, more routine. Less collecting, more making use of what I have already gathered. I want to write more about my time in Taiwan, but that deserves its own reflection. For now, this is the transition point between one kind of stretch and the next.