Hello world, again!

The last time I wrote a blog post was five years ago. I was a year out of college, working at FullStory as the 20th-something engineer. I remember iterating on that blog post countless times based on my colleagues’ feedback.

English isn’t my native language. Writing a “publishable” blog post always mandates tons of time. But every so often I’d get that nudge: “let’s write something.” I’d sit down, ready to draft, but the spark would be gone. My thoughts wouldn’t organize into paragraphs. By the next morning, other priorities had already taken over.

Looking back, I always wanted to become a better writer. After many new years have passed and after recovering from depression, I finally feel ready to be curious again.

Recovering from depression

My life took a downturn in 2023. I hit my rock bottom and was diagnosed with major depressive disorder in early 2024. I was stuck in the cycle of insomnia, bad days at work, and regret.

On paper, I had everything my younger self would have admired: a part-time teaching gig at a university, a dream job at Google. I loved my work. But I couldn’t hold onto everything I loved anymore. I took a break from corporate and travelled across India, Bhutan, Vietnam, Singapore, and Thailand. My therapist told me: “To break the cycle, change your environment if you can.” She was right. Traveling did something good to my mind.

In between my travels, I found a role at a startup that let me split time between the US and Vietnam. In the second half of 2024, all aspects of my life started to change. In the morning, I biked to a coffee shop for a $1 cup of coffee, spoke my native language on the streets (something I hadn’t done regularly in 14 years). On weekends, I wandered around Saigon or escaped to the countryside.

2025 was the continuation of my healing journey. I started to exercise more regularly, truly finished reading a book, and prioritized my health above anything else. I came across biome while trying to improve CI performance. Their Discord server has such warm and welcoming energy, full of volunteers willing to code just for fun. I contributed a few PRs just for fun. Through that, I discovered Bluesky, Mastodon, and dove into more open-source communities. Being part of these communities sparked my joy for programming again. It felt like traveling across little islands versus staying on Google’s giant island.

Honing my focus

I learned to code by accident. In my junior year, my electrical engineering internship boss needed help automating some AutoCAD tasks, so I took Harvard’s CS50. A few months later, I switched my major and never looked back.

I stumbled into developer tools the same way. At FullStory, another senior engineer and I were assigned to found an app framework team from scratch to accelerate React adoption. As the React adoption gained enough traction, I moved to the build team to make sure CI time wouldn’t churn as the Typescript codebase grew. That experience got me a position to work on Bazel again at Google.

My career path keeps pivoting so much that I don’t claim to be an expert in anything. I guess that’s the nature of this profession. Or perhaps that’s what they call “generalist”? But as I progressed in my career and as I recovered from mental issues, my focus became more clear. I’m leaning into learning things at a fundamental level; nailing music scales instead of just playing chords for popular songs, finding commonalities between build systems, or even finding gaps in existing programming language toolings and contributing to fill those gaps.

In 2026 and beyond, I’ll study things that are fundamental and won’t go out of fashion quickly. Along the way, I’ll learn to embrace imperfection, discomfort, and failure.

So here I am. Hello world, again!