TL;DR: Holy shit.

Health

First, the pandemic. I have not contracted COVID-19 and I don’t know anybody who died from it. I know people who were infected by the virus, but they’ve all turned out okay. I’ve been lucky so far. I was tested in December because I had a fever and a cough. Thankfully the test was negative. There’s also good news on the horizon: we’ve reached the end of the beginning. The vaccines have started rolling out this month. I just need to hold on until phase 5, and then everything should start to return to normal.

I remember when the first cases were reported in New York. I looked up the infection and death rates from the virus, plugged them into a spreadsheet, dragged the calculation down for 2 months, and then immediately texted my girlfriend to suggest that she buy a few weeks of groceries as soon as she could. About 5 days later, everyone else joined me in feeling like this. There were hour-long lines at Trader Joes, and the local convenience stores were completely out of everything. It’s hard to emphasize how quickly everything shut down and sold out. News articles from the morning were hilariously out-of-date by the afternoon. Companies were revising and re-revising their policies on a daily basis. I know workplaces that went from “we’re open hell-or-high-water” to “we’re shut down for the remainder of the year” in the span of a few days. I’ve heard of several workplaces that took the following approach:

• Monday: “We’re working from the office.”
• Tuesday: “You can work from home if you want.”
• Wednesday: “We’re going to work from home for the rest of the week.”
• Thursday: “Please work from home tomorrow so that we may deep-clean of the office.”
• Friday: “We’re shut down indefinitely.”
• 9 months later: “We’re still closed.”

New York was crazy at the beginning of the pandemic. I felt afraid whenever I was outside. We knew that SARS-CoV-2 is highly contagious, but we didn’t understand its properties. People heavily emphasized washing hands and wiping down groceries, and there were suspicions that masks might make spread worse (on the theory that masks would trap the virus in front of your mouth or nose). I remember walking through grocery stores and holding my breath as I went through aisles with a lot of people. I remember moving out of the way and holding my breath as I walked past people on the sidewalk.

I saw a video by Jeremy Howard demonstrating how to convert t-shirts into masks. I felt a little better with masks on. That weekend, I sewed my own. After that, I began a long process of finding masks that work well with glasses. At this point, I have a good feel for what I need in a mask. Strong nose wire and large enough to cover my face. Adjustable ears. Either black, or a fun pattern. It’s worked out well so far.

Besides the pandemic, my health was pretty good. My weight almost stayed consistent during the year. I see that I ended last year at 201.0, and today I was 204.2. I’ll take that, given how severely the pandemic has restricted my normally active lifestyle. It could have been worse. My girlfriend deserves a lot of credit for my healthy eating habits. She’s a strong advocate for leafy greens and having balanced meals, and she challenges me when my eating habits slip. The pandemic did not help my exercise at all. I barely got around the city this year. I biked to Queens and Manhattan a few times, and I’ve tried walking as much as possible. But mostly I stayed put. I’m excited for the reopening because I’d like to take advantage of things like bouldering gyms for cross-training.

My mental health has remained good, which is a miracle consider that I’ve been tethered to my apartment. It hasn’t been perfect: I feel more irritable and cooped-up in general. But I’ve adapted to staying in my apartment. I miss a lot. I’m excited to go out again. I’m excited to eat at restaurants and go to museums again. I’m going to visit my family when I can.

I left my job at Etsy. See the Career section for the story. This had a noticeably positive impact on my health. I’ve slept more every night. I take long walks during the day. My step count is up on average. I take the time to cook healthier lunches. I’ve been exercising more, and I was already running 3 or 4 times a week.

Career

As I mentioned in the last section, I left my job at Etsy in November.

The reason was simple: I had always wanted to start my own software development company. Every time I got a stock grant, I would ask myself, “Do I want to work until my next one?” It was a convenient amount of time to consider. Normally I was granted stock every 3 months, but now that I had been there for 4 years (and some boring details with the stock refresher program), I got about the same amount but every 6 months instead. So I asked myself, “Do I want to do this job for another 6 months?”

My specific job was no longer better than the alternative of working for myself. I highly recommend Etsy as a place to work. It’s growing quickly, they have a good mission, the people are phenomenal and kind, and it has a positive impact on the world. I personally just ended up in the growing pains of a medium-sized company on the cusp of becoming a large company.

So what happened? For about a year and a half, I worked on adding GraphQL as an internal API layer within Etsy. I’m proud of the work that I did. I was given an incredible amount of latitude to design and build the support for it. It’s some of the best engineering that I’ve ever done. Adding an entire API layer to a medium-sized company is hard, but we successfully launched, got some people using it, got some wins, and were growing it. Yet there were serious staffing challenges on the project. At the beginning of 2020, we were 2 engineers and were promised 2 more would be added. The 2 promised headcount vanished at the beginning of the pandemic, and the other engineer was unable to work for vast swaths of the year. Consequently, I worked alone for most of the year. It was too much for me. Working on a growing an API layer and working by myself was burning me out. Taking a 6 week break and working on another team didn’t shake this feeling for me. Problems like this are difficult to fix. Hiring takes months. Onboarding and ramping up takes months. So this was a problem that would take roughly 6 months to fix.

I want to emphasize that Etsy is a great place to work. I would work there again. If you don’t work there, you should seriously consider it. They pay well and the work is meaningful. My situation was an edge case. A lot of Etsy’s practices were developed while it was a small or a medium-sized company. But make no mistake: it is rounding the bend to being a large company: It just entered the S&P 500. Sometimes it takes scale and growth to uncover problems. Things that worked at the smaller scale break when the company is three times larger. I encountered one of these growing pains, but it’s the kind that the company will learn how to avoid over time.

So I’m setting out on my own. I’ve been inspired by the stories that I’ve heard on the Indie Hackers podcast. Unlike many, I am so fortunate that 2020 improved my financial footing. My expenses went down and my savings went up. Accordingly, I’m in the best position of my life to start a new business that can be successful. I started a company called Jaunty, Inc. using Stripe Atlas.

I’m waiting for the IRS to issue my EIN, which will allow me to set up a business bank account and have fully-separated finances. But the IRS is currently backlogged. In fact, the IRS won’t even respond to the question “has it been issued yet?” until I’ve been waiting for 45 days, and I’ve been waiting for 30. Accordingly, I’ve been trying to learn skills that I can reuse when I can have separated finances.

I spent about a month having conversations with people who run small businesses. I had two goals for these conversations: first I wanted to get a sense of the challenges that they face. These might be my problems soon. Second I wanted to see if there were obvious problems that I could solve. It would be nice if I could build services to help small businesses. The responses had many similarities: lots of people had trouble getting users in the door, lots of people were uncertain how to market or identify traction channels that would work for them, and their problems were often hyper-specific and hard to generalize across all of them. These conversations helped me understand that just identifying a problem doesn’t help that much if the problem isn’t concrete. Sure, companies “need help,” and often have trouble making decisions, but this isn’t an actionable problem to start from. It’s a problem in an abstract sense, not a concrete one.

I had a really exciting conversation with a product manager that my friend connected me to. He helped me understand how product managers view idea creation and validation, and gave me a good mindset for validating whether a concrete idea would be useful or not.

Then asking myself, “What could I make without spending much money?”, I spent the month of December trying to set up a free newsletter showing the math behind business advice. My idea was that each post would have interactive tools embedded, and explain the intuition behind why the advice would work. I ended up with 15 subscribers over the month, but I had trouble promoting the newsletter. I got more subscribers by asking for help than I did by promoting the issues that I wrote. Someone described the newsletter as “circling around a good idea without quite hitting it,” which I think was accurate. My girlfriend identified the disconnect, which is that it’s probably suited for a more visual format like video, since the verbal explanations are dense but the visuals in the posts helped. It’s possible that I could have also gotten more traction by continuing to get advice and iterate, but I’m less excited with the idea now that I’ve lived it. Writing weekly blog posts powered by 600+ lines of code each is difficult.

I vastly prefer how I spent November over how I spent December. Building and promoting a newsletter was comfortable. Talking directly with people was awesome – I learned a ton quickly. It helped me understand their day-to-day.

I think that the newsletter is a nonstarter, so I’ve been examining the hosted GraphQL market over the past few days. After all, the very first thing that I purchased for my newsletter was hosting on Vercel. This is a great match for my recent work experience, and I think that I can provide real value to companies here. There’s no obvious single winner in this space, and I think there’s room to create a niche business. Of course, I don’t want to reach out to people around the holidays, so I’ve just been researching for the past few days. In the new year, I will start having active conversations to get a better picture of what people might want in a solution. I found the talk “Your first 60 days” to be really inspiring, and I’m going to try the approach it outlines.

Hopefully, I’ll have some good news to report in the new year. I expect that I will be able to try and fail at 3 ideas during 2021. Hopefully, one of the three will start to get some traction, and I will be able to get some revenue. My 2021 goal is to to rent out a tiny private office. If I learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that I need a separation between my personal space and my work space.

As a coda, this blog was actually pretty successful this year. I had 207,000 page views this year, which is easily a record for me. That’s not a lot by viral internet standards, but it’s a lot for me. The viewers predominantly came from two posts: Why are we so bad at software engineering? and DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use, which had varying degrees of popularity on Reddit and Hacker News. Because of the traffic from these posts, most of my other posts got hundreds of views from people clicking around my blog for more content.

Personal life

My personal life went pretty well during the pandemic. In a lot of ways, I feel guilty that my life went pretty well in a year with so much misery.

My girlfriend moved in as NYC shut down. She’s still here. It was challenging at first – we went from “we get dinner once during the week and spend the weekends together” to “we are in the same space 24 hours per day indefinitely” It was a lot. But we’ve made it work. A few things helped this: routines, clear expectations, making sure we were meeting each other’s needs, and having a good apartment layout. Having three rooms that block sight lines has really helped. It’s been nice cooking with someone every night.

Besides, that, social interactions were infrequent and often strange:

• My sister got married in the park, and we hosted (just) the two of them for dinner afterwards.
• I went for a few walks around NYC with friends.
• My friend’s house flooded unexpectedly. My college friends and I spent the day helping him throw away his ruined stuff and shovel all the mud out.
• We visited my girlfriend’s sister’s family for a short getaway.

This is the complete list of in-person interactions that I have had since March. I know that pandemic shaming is fun, and I definitely didn’t reduce my social interactions as much as some, so I’d be fair game for that.

Besides that, I’ve experimented with video chats with varying degrees of success. My college friends and I have a video game night every Friday, and this has been crucial for helping me feel the passage of time. March feels like it was yesterday, but if I frame it in terms of “how many video game nights has it been?”, I can at least feel some distance.

The most stress I encountered was probably the period between the 2020 election and the period where Joe Biden was announced the winner, with the second-most being the following period where it was unclear whether democracy would hold in the United States, and the following period was reading about the George Floyd protests and seeing the widespread police violence against protestors. I have a nervous habit of chewing my nails when I’m thinking or nervous, and this evolved into literally chewing open sores into my fingers. Thankfully these have mostly healed. At this point, I can handle lemons and limes again without fear. In 2020, I donated a lot of money to causes (Biden’s campaign, organizations like Black Girls Code that bolster education for underrepresented minorities in tech, and organizations that seek to selectively replace policing with policies targeted to specific problems), but I didn’t donate much time this year. I don’t know how to feel about this.

My girlfriend is a professional translator and précis writer. She is extremely concerned with the precise definitions of words. This means that I had the misfortune of learning the difference between the terms coronavirus (a class of viruses), novel coronavirus (a placeholder name before a significant coronavirus strain is named), SARS-CoV-2 (the official name of the virus causing the current pandemic), and COVID-19 (the human disease caused by SARS-CoV-2). Why misfortune? Because I watched people use them interchangeably and incorrectly all year, while also knowing that it wasn’t worth correcting them. This was my small 2020 cross to bear.

2021

My biggest focus for 2021 is getting Jaunty, Inc. on a sustainable course. I would like to end the year by paying myself enough of a salary to cover all of my monthly expenses, and also to be able to rent an office somewhere. $10k-15k in monthly revenue is the line where many people can start doing this. This would put me close to hiring my first employee, but that’s getting ahead of myself.

I’m hoping that I will receive the vaccine by the end of summer. I would like to travel to see my parents. And I definitely need to travel somewhere for a vacation. Getting the vaccine by the end of summer would be exciting, because that means that I’d get to start enjoying NYC again.