When I was young, all of the old people I knew would complain about how quickly the years went past. Now that I am less young than I was (but then again, who isn’t?), I find myself remarking on just how dang quickly the years seem to be going past! Isn’t there a speed limit or something? Where is the gruff, underappreciated traffic cop for the annals of time when you need him?
In fact, he seems only to show up when his absence might be preferred! I got pulled over this year. While on my bicycle! I’ve come to fearlessly embrace the motto “take the lane,” since doing anything else encourages motorists to hurl their heavy machinery past me with the slimmest of margins, while going waaaaay faster than the speed limit. Combine that with needing to be a precog and scan all of the parked cars’ side mirrors in order to prevent oneself from being stopped rapidly by the lack of a shoulder check, and being in the middle of traffic seems like the safest option somehow.
Anyway. A motorist with somewhere to be got fed up with my speed, and decided that swerving between me and a left-turner, while in the middle of the intersection was his best option. The gruff traffic cop noticed this overt breach of driving decorum and rather than chasing the blackened culprit, chose to instead pull me over!
An interesting story? Not really. But that’s kind of what all of 2024 felt like. Being hassled by people in positions of authority. Thankfully, not nearly to the same degree as last year.
Speaking of last year, between the taxman drama and being completely BTFO from writing my third book, I didn’t have much energy to put into my end of year synopsis. Which is regrettable, since the most important parts of 2023 didn’t get written down. Thus, gentle reader, we shall take some time out of our busy schedule for the new year and write down some memories of the old year.
MOST IMPORTANTLY, on September 9, 2023, my now-wife Erin (then fiancee, obviously) and I became wedded in holy matrimony. It was a blast— I brought the bachelor party out for a cheeky day-of parkour session, just daring the lord to put me on crutches. Then I ran around doing a bunch of errands that I probably should have delegated, and was too busy to eat until my cousin Tyler sat me down for pizza and beer and told me that I am now firmly in middle age. Tyler had graciously accepted to be our last-minute wedding DJ, and he knew how to turn the PARTY UP.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Getting married. Between finishing pizza and taking wedding photos, I needed to get dressed for the main event. My bride-to-be had reserved our shared apartment (living in sin! gasp!) for all of the things that brides-to-be need to do on the day of their wedding, so my wedding suit (which was originally an unused best-man suit, thanks Rory) ended up at Andrew’s house. It was a very quick how-do-you-do, in and out, with my pants already off as I came through the front door. Where was my best man throughout all of this? Good question. Where was my best man???? Not sure but I didn’t have time to find out. I had wedding photos to take, and a lot of traffic to get through in order to take them.
I arrived at the quote scene of the crime unquote all by myself, already sweaty and tense. Not from cold feet or anything, just from a busy day and a deep-seated appreciation for punctuality. We took a bunch of photos of me pretending to adjust my cuffs (none of which subsequently ended up on the wall), before my wife arrived with her bridal entourage. I was told to avert my eyes so that we could capture the “first look” on film. And what a first look it was. I knew I was a lucky man to be marrying Erin, but it hadn’t hit me just how lucky until I turned the corner at that downtown art gallery.
The two of us were marched around for a bit, both by our photographer, and by some passersby who also considered themselves photographers. Some ruffians eyed the camera bag and considered doing a brazen theft-job, but some combination of the fire in my glare and the not-wanting-to-fuck-up-someone’s-wedding in their hearts averted the crisis.
As for the wedding itself, well, I don’t need to write it down because I’ll never forget. And even if I somehow did, there is lots of photographic evidence. All I’ll say is that many unmarried friends have since expressed to me their hesitancy throwing a wedding, given that it could never compare to Erin and mine.
So that was the really big thing in 2023 that never ended up in a blog post. But the other thing is that I got into, and did my first semester of grad school! I had wormed my way into UBC’s programming language department, where I had the distinct pleasure of spending 90 minutes on the bus for 90 minutes of class, and an awful TA experience where one guy just kept not doing any marking (fuck James.) But it wasn’t all bad. I got something like a 100% final grade for all of my classes, and met a lot of great people along the way.
But I had set myself up for success, because I was taking a class on dependent types, but ignoring the lectures because I was writing a textbook on dependent types. The book was in crunch mode during the semester, and finally shipped the day before Halloween. Maybe you should go buy a copy.
So those were the highlights of 2023. Which turns us to…
TWENTY TWENTY FOUR.
The main event.
The big kahuna.
Looks kinda weird when you write it out like that. “Twenty twenty”? Weird. Anyway.
Erin and I rang in the new year with some friends at some nice wine bar. As it happens, I don’t drink wine, so I was unexpectedly sober throughout the evening’s festivities. Which was a little harder than I might have expected, given that we were at a weird, semi-participatory burlesque show where a woman slowly popped her suit-of-balloons. It wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but one of our co-revelers—a man particularly lucky at cards—had a big grin all night, which widened considerably when the last two balloons burst.
My first order of business was to drop out of grad school. Between the bus rides, doing too well at classes, being unable to sign up for courses I actually wanted to take, and lack of support, I felt like my time was going to be better spent somewhere else. Anywhere else, really. It wasn’t a rash decision—I’d scheduled meetings with my advisor, and with the grad heads, and all of those people, but nobody seemed to hear what I was saying. I suspect most of the people they need to advise are young twentysomethings without much in the way of life experience or BATNAs. There was a lot of “well sometimes people get sad in the winter,” and not enough of “you’re right, I’ll see what I can do to get you registered for this math course.”
I wasn’t too hung up on it, though. The company I’d been contracting for realized how amazing an engineer I am, and decided to fly me down to LA in order to talk Business. After a really nice dinner and somewhat embarrassing morning meeting, we agreed on a mutually beneficial amendment to my contract. They got a cheaper rate, and I got more hours.
Turns out my phone data doesn’t work in LA, so I bummed a ride to the airport off of the CEO. Because I had somewhere to be. Vegas, baby, where I was meeting my wife for a cheeky weekend. I’d never been, but had reason to go, and she wanted to be there to witness my reactions to the place in real time. I arrived an hour before she did, and hung out in the airport until we were reunited. We had a weird night wandering around the strip, eating $25USD slices of pizza and getting drunk at the most glamorous Taco Bell I’ve ever had the good fortune to encounter.
Also Omega Mart is worth a visit if you’re in Vegas. But the less you know about it, the better a time you’ll have.
Vegas isn’t the sort of place I’d go to by my own volition. I was there for Reasons. In particular, I’d signed up for Covert Methods of Entry, which is essentially a five day intensive spy school. I learned how to get through “most doors, most of the time.” Which includes metaphorical doors like “floors in a building you can access only by restricted elevator.” With the exception of getting into a lock box containing the pieces for a public chess set, I haven’t actually used any of these skills in anger yet. But it’s the sort of thing that changes how you look at the world, and I can now tell you which electronic badge readers are vulnerable to which attacks, by sight alone.
The other fascinating thing that happens at spy school is that you’re surrounded by a bunch of spies. Me? I’m just some nerdy programmer dude who thought it would be fun to understand physical security as well as I understand digital security. Or at least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it. But the OTHER PEOPLE THERE? There was one guy who “worked for the state of Alabama.” There was a guy who claimed to be a professional clown and writer for a sketch comedy show you’ve heard of—who got real interested during the section on weaponized RFID. There was one dude who claimed to have extensive knowledge of physical disguise, due to his work in the field training agents to operate in Jordan—“where both the regime and ISIS are trying to kill you, but with entirely different threat profiles.” A man and a woman were there together, under clearly fake names, who were “database administrators.” The man would ask questions in class, but deftly deflected personal questions aimed in his direction during breaks. The woman didn’t say a single word except for her name, but she would whisper things to the man.
I made sure not to leave my laptop in the room during breaks.
Erin had headed back to Vancouver after the weekend, so I was doing this course on my own in Vegas. Vegas is a pretty terrible place to spend any amount of time, so I put a lot of my downtime into writing some introductory material on computer science with a twist. In January I had found myself affiliated with a group of cool people talking about building some sort of community project to design an entirely new curriculum for thinking about CS. So I was putting my energy towards that. One member of these young Turks had a very different idea about it was that we were working on, and things got unpleasant, fast. This is a person I have great respect for, but it wasn’t the first time things had gotten unpleasant, and I decided the potential upsides from collaboration weren’t worth the gaslighting.
Thankfully, I didn’t have much time to dwell on it, because I got the job I had gone to LA to discuss. The company had been building a custom programming language for several years, but didn’t seem entirely sure about how to go about doing that. I was brought on to help turn the project around, which consisted of meticulously planning and carrying out several HUGE (multi-month) refactors.
Alongside the herculean task of getting this programming language to turn over, I also found myself with a fresh-out-of-school junior, whom nobody else had the time to train or mentor. Although I’d flirted a few times with mentoring in the form of being an official buddy to undergrads, I hadn’t ever been in a position of needing to help bring someone into the fold. Thankfully I’ve had several fantastic mentors over the years, so I channeled my inner Jeffs, Adrians, Neales, Mingfeis, Miles, Judahs, and Conals, and seemed to have managed OK. My ward was a fast learner, and, perhaps unfairly crediting myself for his successes, I consider this experience to have been one of the highlights of the year.
In April, I hopped on a bus, and then a ferry, and then another bus to go visit the indomitable Chris Penner. Chris had unwisely agreed to do ldjam with me, without knowing the full fury to which I throw myself at game jams. We got started at 7pm, and I bought a bunch of energy drinks to get us cooking. Chris was unfamiliar with the subtleties of the MONSTER ENERGY CURVE and didn’t get much sleep that night, despite his best efforts to. As a result, our game didn’t make much progress, and we called it the following afternoon. Not as successful a gamejam as I’d have liked, but hanging out with Chris is always a delight.
Erin and I are trying to buy a house, and in April we really got going. We brought on a realtor. I complained about the realty website, and ended up reverse engineering their site and making my own. Unfortunately I had just read (and listened to) some idiotic advice and slapped my version together an hour faster than I would have otherwise, but it worked significantly less well than if I had just followed my usual engineering practice.
But anyway. House hunting. Erin and I easily went through 500 places on the website, and ended up seeing around 30 in person. Among all of those, there was only one that we actually considered buying, and it came with a strict no-children covenant, which felt like more than we wanted to bite off. It is now January and we are still trying to buy a house. The annoying part is that it isn’t a question of money or anything, there’s just nothing worth buying. How can this be POSSIBLE in a city of two million?
Late 2023, my then-new friend Michael had started pulling together a group of friends, and around this time it really started congealing. United under the Tingling Dinglers moniker, we started hanging out regularly, and occasionally winning bouts of trivia. Never twice in a row, on which we have predicated retiring the name, but probably around six times throughout the year. It’s the first time in a decade that I feel like I’ve got a really robust group of friends in meatspace. We all did a free, online IQ test and have ranked ourselves in the social hierarchy by our self-reported IQs. Rather amazingly, every one of us has a once-in-a-millennium level IQ, with the condensed-matter physicist of the group being the dummy and weighing in at a laughable 157.
I don’t know how it happened, but sometime around here, my friend Daniel and I started being GYM BUDDIES. He goes a few times a week, but only weekly with me. Me? Only weekly. But there’s something amazingly motivating about having someone reliably message you on Sunday morning asking “when we getting swole today?” The gym is above the swimming pool and I keep threatening that I’ll go swimming after a workout one day. It hasn’t happened yet, but maybe next week!
In May, my amazing and gorgeous wife was called to the bar again. It had happened last year in a relatively informal situation, but this time it was for REAL. We got dressed up and went to the courthouse and heard how the law is a noble profession, and all of my family and all of her family came to celebrate. We threw an afterparty at our place, got into the Good tequila, and then kicked everyone out to go to a succulent greek family dinner. The lambchops were some of the best my aunt had ever had. There was some drama at four in the morning, but we sorted it all out.
For months, Erin had been hinting about the most amazing date that she had planned. BUT IT WAS A SECRET. When the day finally came, we went to the Keg and Erin got a load of SURPRISE LAW to accomplish. Which she did! And then we went to see a production of Guys and Dolls, which I had never seen, but had played in. It was nice to be in the audience! Great date all around, but Erin paid the blood price for it, given that she got home and had to work until 3am to do all of the SURPRISE LAW.
My birthday occurs in August, and we threw a big ol’ surprise party. Notice how I said “we.” The surprise wasn’t for me, it was for all of our guests! I have a weird thing about telling people it’s my birthday, since it feels like it guilts people into coming. What’s better is to invite people to a party, and then you can see who your REAL FRIENDS are, because they’re the ones who show up even without the extra birthday prod. Lots of fantastic people showed up, and Luke even crashed the party with some randos! Everyone felt bad that they hadn’t got me anything, but as they say, their presence was presents enough. Also Erin mashed a billion copies of my face into a fantastic icecream cake.
ONE YEAR AFTER OUR WEDDING, which, recall, is where this whole blog post journey began, Erin and I went to San Francisco for our anniversary! We saw some old friends, went on a tiki bar crawl, went on an escape room crawl, and had robots drive us around. The next day, Erin and I went to the SF Moma and saw the most amazing exhibit of our lives which I would STRONGLY STRONGLY recommend you go to. There is no snark here; genuinely the best art either of us had ever experienced. That night we checked into our swanky hotel, ordered Ike’s, and watched the fog roll over the city.
Despite saying we would do zero travel in 2024, and despite having just gone to SF. And also to LA and to Vegas, Erin and I went to Turkey in early November. We stayed in an atrocious tourist ghetto in Istanbul, ate lokum every day, went hot-air ballooning (which is fantastic and I would recommend!), and went to look at lots and lots of ruins. One particularly cool set of ruins is at Aphrodisias, where one emperor or another decided that merchants were all greedy bastards, and he decreed the price of everything. There are sixteen tablets in the agora, each full of prices. Erin and I spent like an hour in the beating sun reading them and comparing the relative prices of things. The most memorable was the ratio between the daily wage of a bathhouse slave (2 units), and the price of a lion (150,000 units.) Which works out to 205 years of minimum wage in order to buy a lion.
Contrast that to our modern economy, where it’s only about 80 days of minimum wage in order to buy a lion! Lots of people like to complain about capitalism, but that sure is something!
Also, we rented a car and drove across Turkey. And it’s a BIG country! Erin suggested we could take a quick detour through the mountains and save a few minutes. What transpired was two hours of extreme white knuckle driving as we went up and down badly paved, single-lane switchbacks, with big trucks somehow coming past us at full speed. Harrowing, but fun.
Some cool stuff happened near the end of the year. My open source project cornelis got upstreamed into the main Agda organization. That feels nice on two counts; presumably they like it enough to make it “official,” and it means I’m off the hook for ongoing maintenance. And at work, I found and subsequently implemented some very cool research. I was given a week to make it happen, and managed to pull it off. The result was a HUGE win for the company, a nice christmas present for my boss, and a great ego trip for me. But boy was I working hard that week. So much so that I was having dreams about it for the next two weeks of my christmas vacation.
During which, Erin and I got extremely sick. We went down to Victoria for a big family brouhaha, and managed to not have very much fun due to staying in bed most of the time. But the family time was much appreciated, and everyone was very understanding.
Which leads us to now. Me, sitting at my desk, writing this very sentence. Still sick, but mostly mended, healed, and saved.
With all that behind us, let’s do a little bit of QS! My favorite (based on actually-listened to) new-to-me albums of the year were:
- Fela Kuti - Highlife
- KNOWER - KNOWER FOREVER
- Everyone is Dirty - Caramels for Grandpa
- Cat Empire - Where the Angels Fall
- Kendrick Lamar - GNX
What about books? It was a hard year for books! My goal was to read 30 books, and I “made it through” (for some definition) 21. But a lot of those were false starts, where I got through like 20% of a VERY LONG BOOK before deciding I didn’t care to finish it. My highlights and recommendations of the year, in no particular order:
- Peter Westergaard - An Introduction to Tonal Theory
- Christopher Alexander - A Pattern Language
- W. J. King - The Unwritten Laws of Engineering
- Daniel Boorstin - The Discoverers
- Charles Brandt - I Heard You Paint Houses
Despite not reading as many books as I would have liked, I read a lot of really cool papers in 2024. A lot of them were around the pi calculus and other ways of thinking about programming. Of particularly cool note is choreographic programming which strikes me as where industry will be in 30 years.
- Functional Choreographic Programming
- New common ancestor problems in trees and directed acyclic graphs
- Functions as Processes
- [Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?] (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/359576.359579)
I did almost no open source this year. I didn’t realize HOW LITTLE until just now when I went to check out what I did on Github in 2024. It’s embarrassing! But I suppose I have a few years’ worth of goodwill on that front still. At work, I landed 299 pull requests, which is a very respectable more-than-one-a-day. And most of those are features and big refactors, baby! You can call me a lot of things, but unproductive isn’t one of them. A long long time ago I told my wife that I don’t have emotions, only productivity. She still teases me about that, but maybe I was on to something.
All in all, it was a pretty good year! Much better than the last few. I’d do it again.
Oh yeah, and I took some selfies too.