I was born in Germany and lived there for two years before my dad moved to Kentucky for a professorship. We lived in Bowling Green, in a neighborhood, and I went to a Montessori school for preschool. I told a girl there I was going to marry her one day. Then we moved to Clemson, South Carolina and I never saw her again, though my mom still sometimes shows me pictures of us from the time.

In Clemson, my dad got a tenure-track position. In first grade I was diagnosed with ADHD. Elementary school was fine. I was a bit of a problem child; in third grade I remember my teacher being very mad that I broke her stamp. I was a little socially isolated through elementary and middle school.

Toward the end of middle school we lived in Peru for six months because my dad had a sabbatical there. Peru has the world's largest dipolar radar array, used for measuring the ionosphere. My parents had been making me do extracurriculars for years— piano, karate, German on Saturday mornings for three hours— so they put me in the German school in Peru. Most of my classes were in German, a couple in Spanish. Peru was fun. I made more friends there than I had before, but when I came back, I felt more separated from my class than I had before I left.

I made a decent number of friends in high school when I started cross country. I'd quit karate and my mom said I still needed to do a sport, so I ran. I really enjoyed it. I was never the best, but I got under 20 minutes for a 5k. Running was stimulating enough that I was able to go off my ADHD medication. I was overachieving academically too; I took 14 or 15 APs and ended up at Cornell. I'd applied to four or five colleges and was certain I'd get in. I didn't get into Brown, which was my top choice, but Cornell was good enough.

Toward the end of high school I had a crush on a girl I ran cross country with. Another guy in the group asked her to prom. I was crushed. I awkwardly asked her out anyway, three months before leaving for college. The fallout left me more socially anxious in the first couple of years of college than I would have liked. I got into anime around then, partly because I was lonely. I was privately embarrassed about it, less because of the anime than because I was watching it because I was lonely.

I originally studied biology because I wanted to do computational biology, but I just found CS classes more fun and switched. A friend on my Quidditch team suggested I join the co-op she was living in, which became my main friend group for the last two years. I also got really into the Mafia Club, and I built the first Mafia Club website (mafiaclub.github.io), which is still in use. They still play every Friday at 9pm until God knows what time.

I took a lot of compilers and PL classes at the end of college and did an internship at Microsoft, where I made good friends and asked a girl out for the first time since high school. I got rejected, but we're still friends. We ended up being roommates after I took the return offer in Seattle. COVID hit, and me, her, another guy from the internship, and another friend in the same apartment complex became a pod. One of the best times of my life.

Eventually I left Microsoft for a Haskell startup to live my dream of being a functional programmer. There, I learned that doing functional programming is still programming; the software industry doesn't get better if you do it in a different language. So I went to Duolingo to work on a product I believed in, and after three years it turns out Duolingo is also just a software engineering company with all the problems of a software engineering company. I quit in February and am now trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life. I've made a lot of friends in Pittsburgh and plan to live there at least another year.

The best advice I've gotten is from Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis: "happiness comes from between"— the idea that happiness comes from connecting with people.