Life on jeffcarp

Rules to Live By

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

John Cage’s 10 rules for students and teachers

Kevin Kelly - 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known

Kevin Kelly - 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

Dru Riley - 100 Rules To Live By

Khe Hy - 43 life lessons at age 43

Octaphilosophy: The Eight Elements of Restaurant André

Thelonious Monk’s 25 Tips for Musicians

Ideopunk - 100 Tips for a Better Life

Russ Roberts - My Twelve Rules for Life

2022 Year in Review

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hi friends,

Like last year, here’s a brief overview of what I got up to in 2022.

Running

Despite this being my biggest running year in terms of mileage (683mi), I struggled with injuries pretty much the whole year, likely due to too much racing and not enough training.

My “goal race” for this year was running the Four Pass Loop, a 28mi loop with 9000ft of vert around the Maroon Bells in Colorado and rated the #1 trail run in the country on Trail Run Project. I made it about halfway before turning around, due to running the Double Dipsea two weeks before and not giving myself enough time to recover.

2021 Year in Review

Sat, 25 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I wasn’t initially planning on writing a year in review blog post for 2021, but I was recently reminded of how nice it is to have a concise public record of the things that were important to me for each year (even if nobody other than me reads it). So here it goes!

Highlights

Getting vaccinated!
Going back out to restaurants and dining
Attending weddings of my two of my best college friends
First Waymo SF ride
Traveling again
Wednesday morning trail runs

Things I Wish I Had Known About Earlier

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 21:02:53 -0800

Anki and Spaced Repetition

I’ve adopted the Anki app to help learn new vocabulary and retain various things I learn Currently my decks are:

My Anki decks

Spaced repetition flashcards are great. I would have done much better in school if I had known about them.

Investing and Indexing

For most of my 20s I didn’t know much about investing, so I avoided it. Better to not risk my money, is what I thought. Turns out holding cash is also risky. I wish I had known about index funds earlier — the book that taught me the most on the subject is Jack Bogle’s The Little Book of Common Sense Investing.

2020 Year in Review

Sun, 27 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

2020. What can I say? It was a year I don’t think any of us need to live again. Here’s a brief overview of my year.

Highlights

In February on Valentine’s day, Elva and I adopted Noona(!), an 8 year old Siberian Husky. She’s the chillest, sweetest dog. Due to lockdown starting 2 weeks later, I’m sure she thinks that spending all day at the house giving her attention is normal.

2019 Year in Review

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 04:37:09 +0700

In 2019 I got married—twice! (to the same person!) I changed jobs. I ran my first marathon. 2019 was a huge year in my life.

I grew in a lot of ways this year. Wedding planning was a huge undertaking and strengthened our communication and quick decision making skills. Additionally this year I started working with a therapist which has been great—I’m wondering why I never thought of doing that earlier.

I'm Joining Waymo

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 15:38:38 -0800

Quick life update: I’ve left the Chrome team and joined Waymo (formerly the Google self-driving car project). I’ll be working on ML infrastructure.

It was a fantastic whirlwind 3 years working on infrastructure for Chromium and helping to–in a very small way–push the open web forward. On the team I launched wpt.fyi, a resource to help align the APIs of all browsers. I worked on syncing source code across repos. I launched a couple TensorFlow ML models. And I helped make the bug tracker quicker and more useful for everyone in the project.

2018 Year in Review

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 15:39:13 -0700

For the past few years I’ve been summing up my yearly highlights in a blog post. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads these posts—it’s nice to have these to be able to look back on the big things that happened in my life each year.

So without further ado, here’s an overview of the big things that happened in my life in 2018, from Running, to Reading, Learning Work, and Health, finally looking at how I did on my 2018 goals and setting 2019 goals.

Goodbye 2017, Hello 2018

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 21:33:26 -0700

Hi friends, here’s a quick overview of what I was up to this year.

The most important thing that happened this year

On a sunny day in August 2017, literally the smartest and most beautiful person I know and I embarked on a beautiful trail run on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin that ended on top of a mountain. Once we got to the summit, I asked her to marry me. She said yes!!!

2016 Year in Review

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 15:39:13 -0700

2016 turned out to be a pretty crappy year, but it wasn’t all terrible. I made some good progress on my personal goals, so there’s that. Here’s a review of my 2016. If this sort of post strikes you as excessive navel gazing, that’s because it is — therefore I urge you to stop reading right now.

Work

The theme for this year of my life is probably “insane amounts of learning.” In the first half of 2016 I was at Braintree working on a new payments platform. In August I joined the Google Chrome team.

2015 in 5 Themes

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 21:39:13 -0700

Here are the 5 most defining themes of my 2015, in no particular order.

1. Scapula

I fractured my scapula (shoulder blade on my right side) on December 24, 2014 while skateboarding with my sister. I spent most of January 2015 resting and recovering. Part of that meant starting physical therapy.

PT was such a good influence on not just my scapula, but other parts of my life, that I consider breaking my scapula a highly net positive life event.

Interviewing 2 Years in: What Worked

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m almost pee-my-pants excited to announce that next week I’ll be joining the team at Braintree and Venmo to work on their JavaScript SDK.

Now that my job search is over, I want to share the lessons I learned from interviewing as a software engineer 2 years into my career. Most of these are not new (or specific to being 2 years into your career), but these points are what specifically helped me the most.