Health

Just when I thought I was fully recovered, things got worse! Increasingly after workouts in the spring, I developed hip pain. After limited progress with physical therapy, I met with a sports medicine doctor who ordered an MRI. I discovered I had hip impingement and a torn labrum. There were a few options, but I ultimately went with surgery in early July. I’m coming up on 16 weeks post-op. The recovery has been frustrating so far, mainly with respect to how limited I have been activity-wise. So far, my surgical team has been pleased with the results but it’s been a long recovery. I’m hoping for improvement by the 6 month mark.

Obviously, this has held back progress in the gym. Outside of that, I have been fairly diligent about wearing my Oura ring I got at the end of last year. The days I sleep well are better days. I’ve also started to track my diet more seriously with MacroFactor. As I continue to recover, I hope to be systematic with my fitness goals and get back to things I love and want to try.

Work

I’m slowly coming up on a year at Altana. It’s been interesting, to say the least. It’s been really exciting to work in a new domain I’m excited by. There’s been a whole lot of negative too.

One thing I’ve come to realize is, lately, I get more excited by working on my own projects compared to enterprise work. At the same time, I still have to pay rent and enjoy the sort of problems you encounter with larger systems.

I’ve worked on more side projects this year than ever before which is exciting. Breadth isn’t depth and AI assisted coding may misrepresent true activity. I’d like to publish these projects on another page soon.

With this venture in to the world of startups, I’m beginning to consider starting my own. I did most of YC’s Startup School last summer during my noncompete and am now using their cofounder matching service.

With everything going on, I’ve had to put down OMSCS for the Fall, and maybe indefinitely. We’ll see. I took High Performance Computer Architecture this summer which was especially fascinating – learning how a CPU really works. In hindsight, I should have written more about this.

Life

Life in New York has been really great, and what a summer for it! We had the World Cup, the Knicks championship, the US Open, and so much more. I’m blessed to have met a bunch of people I now consider close friends. I also reconnected with a number of friends based here. There are so many ambitious, diverse people here as well as technology events. I’ve really settled in to my apartment with my overpriced Hue lights. Trying to live more irl, I finally sold my gaming PC.

I haven’t traveled as many places this year as last. I went to London and Livigno, Italy with a pit stop in Zurich earlier this year. I visited Washington D.C. briefly for work. I visited family across Germany for a very short trip. Some friends and I even took on Wildwood, NJ which I haven’t been to in over a decade. I’m looking forward to an upcoming trip to Wisconsin, my first time there, and hopefully some travel during the holiday season.

Speaking of Germany, I restarted in-person German classes at NYU. I’m worried the commitment is chewing in to time for other things, but I’ve really enjoyed it so far.

I haven’t read as much this year as I want to – poor time management while juggling other things. I enjoyed the following:

• Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
• Schizoposting
• The Power of Now
• The Thinking Machine
• Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

It’s surreal to feel the time flying by. It feels like I just moved here. We’ll see what the next year brings.