summer update iv

short post

• my work at exafunction ended. it was interesting and i got a return offer but i’d prefer not to think about it for now as i have a lot of related post-college decisions to make, the most pressing one being where to live. if i work a standard in-person tech job the options are mostly limited to nyc and the bay area, and i am more productive in the office, but i still think remote work might be better for its flexibility. i am seriously considering trying to convince some friends to all take remote jobs and live together in eg. kansas city (which polls like fortune/businessinsider rank as the best place to live while working remotely). i think it would be nice to get away from the cultures of sf/ny for a while; more on that in a later post maybe. unfortunately it will probably be hard to convince other people to move, even if i am willing to
• i went to a mixer hosted by neo (a startup accelerator + venture capital firm) and got bored incredibly quickly. the event was full of smart college-aged people, many of whom i could probably have interesting conversations with if we had a regular hangout, but for some reason all the conversations were about our jobs and a) i didn’t want to have to keep explaining what i do at exafunction to different people b) i already knew what problems most of the other attendees’ companies were trying to solve so that was not interesting to listen to. on the bright side, they had nice food and i got to talk to the former leader of google calendar + gmail, who was pretty cool. anyway this is a bit upsetting because i’d been looking forward to joining the neo community for a while (as some of my older friends were in neo a few years ago) but if all the events are like this i think i will not enjoy them. it’s still the case that all my best social interactions have been in groups of <=4 people and maybe i should stop expecting to find communities where the large group interactions are good
• my friend found this burmese restaurant called yamo via reddit. we went and they had the best noodles i’ve ever experienced, by a wide margin. i did not realize it was possible for noodles to have that much flavor 
• one of my favorite people on twitter had an sf meetup! said person being visakanv, author of this post on relationship conflicts that i like a lot. he was fun to talk to; his in-person and writing voices were pretty similar, and he had a very soothing singaporean accent. i realized i really enjoy listening to singaporean accents, conditional on the person being able to articulate consonants well (maybe this means the person has to learn english early enough to get the consonants but not so early that there is no accent?)
• going home tomorrow. surprisingly, i don’t really have any updated thoughts on whether i want to live in sf or south bay in the future; i’ve learned a lot and know the two areas reasonably well now, but there are no feelings associated with the learnings, which i find unusual. this could be a sign that i’m emotionally blocked in some way, or it could mean that i simply don’t care that much about location and should choose based on other factors
• i used to only ever plan ~3-6 months in advance, because that is the timeline that aligns best with school semesters and internships, and planning for longer horizons wasn’t really feasible. now i am starting to feel the need for some longer-term management and organization strategies, eg. what kind of person do i want to be in four years and what do i hope to have accomplished by then? these are questions i am not used to thinking about, though i’m confident i can answer them well thanks to the amount of exploration i’ve done during college. of course, even if/when i have this figured out, all my actionable items will probably still only exist on the timescale of months, but regardless i need to start thinking about the bigger-picture stuff so that my immediate plans become more coherent. tldr too much of the past few years has been dominated by fomo and drift, and i think it is time to put an end to that