Month: May 2023

Did do you anything special for Mother’s Day, I asked. “No. My culture doesn’t celebrate Mother’s Day, but…” He continued “To me, every day is Mother’s Day.” Why? “I call my mom every day anyway.”

A twenty-something me might have ridiculed him. But this forty-something me would give him pure respect. Such a routine is not my character, but that character is not something I’m proud of. What is the relationship like when you do it? It’s beyond my imagination.

I called my mom and told the story. She was politely impressed, as she always is. We had a brief conversation after that, then said goodbye.

Today is a Mother’s Day. I know tomorrow wouldn’t, but next Wednesday maybe it is.

Twenty Years of Blogging | Hacker News

Looking at my back number, the oldest entry was in Nov. 16, 2003. So my blogging also has lasted almost twenty years.

I vaguely remember I had an even older “blog” or web site, but that’s something I’d rather cancel, so let’s pretend it’s almost twenty-years old. It is still a long time.

While reading these old diaries, various feelings come back to my mind. It is love, it is an embarrassment, it is an excitement, it is boredom, it is despair… It feels a bit overwhelming every time these back number titles show up in front of me. I appreciate my younger self captured the moment I lived, on the Internet.

A Hacker News comment says:

The best time to start blogging was twenty years ago. The second best is today – having a personal blog is an investment that just keeps on compounding over time, even if you only post things there a few times a year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35881356

I no longer consider blogging as an investment. To me, it becomes more about keeping the light on. It is like a tradition, like writing a holiday card, or like repairing an old car and driving it on July fourth.

My writing isn’t as interesting or as forthcoming as before, but still I don’t want to throw every present moment away into Ether, even if they are banal. I left little during the pandemic, and such an abandonment made me sad. I don’t want that again. So let’s keep the light on.

A bot sent me a pull request that removes an ACL entry of ok e of my former teammates L which, the bot claims, becomes invalid. He left the company says the PR.

Not hearing a good bye is fine as we weren’t friends but were just peers, but getting notified by a bot never feels great. I just threw the PR away and close the tab.

L was an industry veteran. One day he told me that his first job was programming on a PDP-11, the computer UNIX was invented. I was so excited to hear that and asked him if he programmed in C. The answer was no. “It was too early.” said him – It was obvious in retrospect. There were many other stories like this, many of which I forgot unfortunately. This particular one still sticks to my mind and shines like a gem.

L probably retired from his long career. Thinking about that gives me a moment of warm feeling – Retiring in Silicon Valley! It is such an accomplishment.

L and his peers came to the company through an acquisition, and their culture was very different from the one of the acquirer; They were always talking about politics at lunch (and they were Republicans), they were loud, they occasionally used F and S words. Still they were more tight-knit than any other teams I have experienced here.

L was rough even among the peers. Sometimes it made him hard or unpleasant to work with.

L grew up in Kansas, got his education on the east coast (MIT!) and worked in a government related job, then road-tripped to California to start a new one. He had stories and characters. And I loved them, even though I was occasionally annoyed by his behaviors. He was rough, like his stories.

It felt like America. A different version from mine, which is a variation of Bay Area stereotype – Asian dense, financially stable, gentle but transactional. I like my version, but I also preach the version I briefly witnessed.