Well, it’s been quite a while (eight whole months!) since I’ve sat down and put my thoughts down on paper. A lot has changed since I spent A Month Alone in Toronto last summer:
- I moved to the University of Waterloo and started my undergrad
- I made lots of great friends, something, and something (TODO: FILL THESE)
- I moved to San Francisco and started working at Vercel
- I made lots of great friends, something, and something (TODO: FILL THESE)
Today, I turned 19 in NYC! I ended my internship at Vercel last Friday, flew to nyc to visit my friends and the Modal team for the week, and will be heading back to SF for the foreseeable future.
waterloo
My time at UW was fairly short-lived. During my four months there, I met dozens of students and made a handful of really great friends, resulting in even more fascinating and world-numbing (TODO: CHANGE THIS WORD FROM WORLD-NUMBING) conversations. Like most students, I skipped most of my classes, only to realize how interesting lambda calculus, ASTs, racket, and functional programming were toward the very end of the semester. I spent a lot of time on-campus, grinding out at VD at 3am in the -15c weather. I worked on silly projects, assembled cool robots, and participated in the waterloo standard of applying to jobs, stealing hack the north food, and doomscrolling an unfortunate amount. Featured below are: my SO101, something, and something. (TODO: FILL THESE)
sf
While fairly corny, I jotted down these three sentences sometime during the past four months, which I think pretty accurately characterize how my time in SF has been.
work
There is something inexplicably redeeming of walking down the streets of San Francisco’s Financial District at 18. Something that caters to my inner Mike Ross, […]
My time at v0 was quite phenomenal: an incredibly driven team, immense amounts of autonomy, and lots of friends and fun. From a work-in-public Slack policy to a put-time-on-anyone’s-calendar culture, Vercel gives you all the resources you would need to ramp up at a breakneck pace: to absorb the company by osmosis. You learn how v0 works not from any onboarding docs or knowledge transfer videos, but rather from absorbing every single Slack thread in every single channel: who owns what, the highest-impact work to take up, and who you can ping at 8pm. There’s a constant low hum of “this just broke in prod,” but someone is definitely already on it.
Walking down Mission Street in the morning past the Salesforce Tower with a badge clipped to your hip. Proper Food lunch runs with the team, intern ping pong breaks that turned into hour-long sessions. Fitness SF after work and the same Chipotle order four nights a week. Late-night Waymos home through an empty SoMa, blasting music and Claude Code in hand.
something (TODO: CHANGE THIS)
Even more so, there is an another indescribable sensing of leaving the office at 11pm, zipping through the night-lit city in a Waymo
alone
And on the weekends, walking the length of ocean beach: the last four months has been a unique experience of finding joy in time by myself.
up next
finally, a short list of things i promised myself i would do but did not do
- mail a letter my grandparents for their 50th wedding anniversary
- ship all the birthday gifts i bought for my friends
- talk to more people across gtm/eng/finance/legal teams at vercel
- return to school for the summer