Year of Varun #22 - A Retrospective

I’m 23 today. Happy one year closer to death¹ for me!

This is the second retrospective post I’m making for my birthday. Again, still cliche considering no one reads this shit, but there’s a lot to talk about. I like to think I’m an interesting enough person.

If you’re interested, visit Year of Varun #21 for the past year’s edition of this post.

Jobs

Somehow I cycled through getting three jobs in the same year. Call it the pinnacle of inconsistency, or maybe call it a flex because getting interviews in this job market is a complete crapshoot. But hey, gotta start somewhere right?

First, my lucky stint with ANDYL, where I met the CEO at a Nix user group at UC Berkeley. Afterward, I had another stint with Pangolin for a while. And now, I’m at Neuralink, offer in hand, starting next week. I’m super thankful for everyone that gave me opportunities to grow in my own technical skills (and other skills too!), while teaching me some pretty hard lessons along the way, and I’m also super excited for the new opportunities coming my way at Neuralink².

Moving between jobs like this, however, is taxing. Pop tech culture dictates that employees are only a net positive on productivity after 6 months; however true/untrue this may be, the reality is that onboarding is hard, and becoming a net productivity gain is only harder.

So, my takeaway for this year, based on all this movement? Stay put at this new job for as long as possible. This is so I don’t hamper my own growth, and so I can start to value stability as much as I say I do. Actions speak louder than words, after all. Plus, I really like the people on my team already. They all are really cool people.

Open Source

I am still continuing my open-source projects. In fact, I moved a lot of them to SourceHut, and I’m glad I did, considering the massive amounts of GitHub outages that have been happening³.

Working on them concurrently with work has been a bit of a challenge recently; I noticed that I tend to work on these projects in bursts. Since I’m often the sole maintainer, I have to moderate this kind of work though, because burning out on FOSS work is just not the way I want to go out.

More School??

Remember how last year I thought 2025 was gonna be my last year of school?

Turns out that may not be the case.

I got accepted into Georgia Tech right around the time I received a job offer from Neuralink! So I’m gonna have to figure out how to balance an online cybersecurity degree with the full-time work I’m doing.

Funny enough, I decided to do this program on impulse, but I think it will end up doing me a whole ton of good. I want to teach in the future, and getting a masters is a surefire way of ensuring I can do that down the line.

Music

Unfortunately, this year was not a good year for my music career. I’ve just been so goddamn busy that I’ve been neglecting practice most of the time.

I don’t think this is a priority shift as much as it is just me being lazy. After I stopped playing for churches, I just didn’t have a fire lit underneath me to actually practice, so being the naturally lazy person I am, I didn’t. And my skills have definitely regressed. My musical intuition is still alive, but I need to make sure I don’t keep neglecting this or this will get worse.

Here’s to practicing at night, in open fields, with a joint and sticks in hand.

On the other hand, I’m making music with Logic Pro a lot more than I used to. It’s therapeutic for me and I get to sample real-life noises and stuff with a shitty room mic. Not to mention, with all the new music I’ve listened to in the past year, I’m taking influence from genres and artists that high school me would have disapproved of.

What’s Next?

Well, my resolutions for the year are quite clear. I’m a full-blown adult now and I just need to make sure I’m living my dreams as needed. So, in order:

1. Stay consistent at work and keep innovating there.
2. Keep practicing music actively.
3. Go to the damn gym!