2020, You're on Mute - Year in Review

brasserie mollard

To get the full context of 2020, I need to go back to 2019. Don't worry, just to the day before. It was a cool evening night in Paris, and my family and I were dining at Brasserie Mollard to celebrate New Year's Eve. The restaurant was packed and busy. I distinctly remember how slowly the courses were coming out. But who cared? More time to chat and we wanted to be there when the first moments of 2020 came into existence.

After a great meal, and celebrating entry into 2020, we stepped outside where it was somehow even more crowded. Everyone in Paris was celebrating. And to add to the chaos, a union strike meant reduced train services and road closures that bisected the city. One side of the city had all the cabs; the other had barely any. Guess which one we were in?

But things worked out, as they always do. As soon as I got back to the apartment we were staying at, I began some last-minute packing. I'd leave the next day.

Early the next morning, New Year's Day, I made my way through Charles de Gaulle's futuristic yet impractical architecture to board my full flight.

The previous day had marked my last day in Paris, the last day of 2019, and the first time the Chinese Government alerted the WHO of a suspicious cluster of pneumonia cases.

COVID Dominates The Year

What followed was completely unexpected and caught everyone off guard. Little did I know the congested and cramped environs of Paris that I had just experienced would be viewed as an existential threat months later.

I don't remember the first time I heard or learned about the Coronavirus. But I do remember wondering to myself, as I listened to Up First on my packed Chicago L car, how long it had been since the Coronavirus had not been mentioned in a story every day. As I chatted about it with my friends, I remember exclaiming, "I'm not worried at all given how packed the L is." But at the same time I remember only using one hand on the bars during my train ride and keeping the other free for my phone to prevent crossover of germs. In the early term, I didn't see it as a threat. No one did. I didn't know how pandemics worked. I thought that since China was taking drastic and draconian measures to cordon off the epicenter, we would be safe in the US. Obviously that's not how it played out.

Google

Still, there were other big changes in store. I had decided to switch jobs to Google. As my start date grew nearer, cities around the country began issuing shelter in place warnings. My last week at JPMorgan turned out being remote. Most of my office belongings are still stuck in the Chicago Chase Tower skyscraper. But not only was my last week remote, so was my first at Google.

Goodbye Chicago, Hello California

My departure from Chicago was delayed to say the least. My first day at Google was in late April, but I didn't get to California until October. I was going to move in April, but Google froze relocations. Google asked me to ask my landlord for an additional three months. My landlord nicely agreed. After the three months were up Google asked if I could get another 3 months. My landlord said he could only do a year. Google said as soon as they returned to the office in any capacity, I'd have 3 months to get to CA. So obviously that wasn't going to work, so I moved out at the end of July. Two days later, Google announced we could work from home an additional year. What. Timing.

Still, I found it especially difficult to leave my apartment and neighborhood. As a renter, I never developed a sense of equity in the place and knew clearly that I would not be there forever. But leaving forced me to confront the fact that I had built a home there. In college I stayed in a different apartment every year, so really my stay in that apartment was the longest duration I had lived in one place since my childhood home, which I had not lived in for over 6 years.

But my fixation on my apartment was merely a symptom of a broader feeling. The feeling of moving on. After looking at my blank apartment after the movers finished, I couldn't help but harken back to the first time I viewed that apartment in an identical state and think about all that had happened in between.

And now I have looked at my new blank-slate apartment in Mountain View. It will be an adjustment moving here, but I'll be close to work as soon as it starts opening in any form (whenever that is...). And so, even though I have no clue what the next chapter will be like, I am well-positioned when it is ready to start.

New Work

I've been on my team at Google for over 7 months at this point (time flies). It's required a big dose of ramping up. Google builds all of its own tooling, and often the common open source paradigms don't translate very well.

Open source projects lure in users (and thus contributors) through great developer experience. There's a big market of tools out there, and with it big competition. At Google there really isn't a choice, so the tools are unsurprisingly optimized for performance and task over developer experience. It's a great learning opportunity to see the many layers of the stack that deliver your search results (and ads!) and how they are optimized within an inch of their lives so that you can get your results as fast as possible. But it's required me reimagining how systems look and interact. That being said, some of the tools I work with are true masterpieces of engineering, and I've only scratched the surface.

Predictions and Conclusions

If 2020 has taught me anything, a year can change course in the blink of an eye. But here are my predictions for 2021 (to be updated as they come true or not ✅/❌):

A lot of people always ask me if I regret making such big changes during a pandemic. Without taking too much time to think, I always respond that it was in fact worth it. Since staying and home and limiting contact is required during these trying times, it's easy for life to feel stagnant. I'm glad that I have continued moving forward. This year posed challenges, and 2021 will hold many of those challenges, but I'm fortunate to have an outlook that things will work out, as they always do.

Favorite Photos of 2020

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