📝 2024 Wrapped

I’m writing this on the flight back to SF from Delhi. Sleep is elusive and there’s no Wi-Fi on Air India to guilt me with its siren song of Slack notifications.

Here are some 2024 highlights:

Making SF a home 🌉

We moved to San Francisco last year, but spent about a year settling in properly. I’m a double-immigrant at this point (h/t to Past Lives), and I’ve moved cities multiple times in my life; it takes about that much time for a place to slip under my skin and feel like second nature—like a home does. Given that we’re thinking of living in the Bay Area long-term, it felt important to see if this was a place I could belong to.

SF responded to my loving. It’s nice living in a Real City, an important place with a strong gravitational pull. SF still has that relevance, social media discourse notwithstanding. I was deliberate about establishing routines centered around people; people are 75% of what fuels attachment to geography anyway. SF feels like home now.

Sometimes I wonder if I had made more of an effort to love Ottawa, if I would have felt similarly. Does every city respond to loving?

Commons and Center 🏘️🧘

We live around Hayes Valley in SF, a great spot in hindsight, because we’re so close to SF Commons and The Center—two uniquely San Franciscan establishments. SF Commons is a membership-based social club that functions as a third space, while the The Center is a yoga studio-meets-teahouse. The crowd at The Commons skews tech and AI but with a wordcel twist (think journaling and sci-fi book clubs), and The Center attracts a more woo-woo New Age kind of person (sample events: ecstatic dance, sound healing). Like I said, very SF.

I love both vibes obviously, so I’m often at one or the other. Some friends and I go to a weekly yoga class at The Center (brutal but fulfilling) with Kirin Power and I attend book clubs and Writing Club events at The Commons.

Frisbee 🥏

I’ve been wanting to expand my physical recreation horizons beyond running. I’ve started going for frisbee in Golden Gate Park on Saturdays. I’ve never played Ultimate before so it’s been fun picking it up and improving slowly and (only sometimes) painfully. Best part though are the big social lunches afterwards, especially when they’re at Marnee Thai.

Football ⚽️

I’ve spent countless hours of my childhood being obsessed with football (or “soccer” depending on your persuasion) and FIFA (or FC as the game is now called), but gave both up once I moved to North America. This year I’ve been getting back into football. A friend and I have been playing Manager Mode on FC 24 together, which has been a lot of fun. We play Rangers FC. I got to play a lot of football with my cousin during my India trip, who is very good at both game and IRL football. It’s also just been fun catching up on player lore and sharing Instagram reels and edits.

Tango 🕺

I’ve wanted to learn a dance form for a while, and given that we were going to Buenos Aires in March, I started learning tango in January. I met a lot of great people, and stuck with it for a while, but I don’t know if I enjoy tango in particular. Maybe I just didn’t like the pedagogical style at this particular studio: instructions change from instructor to instructor and between lessons, which is confusing for a beginner. I keep vacillating about whether I want to give it more time or to just call it quits and try something new.

Traveling ✈️

I started out 2024 resolving not to travel at all. I’ve long thought that the millennial dream of finding meaning through travel is a fallacy; a layer of icing disguised as the cake. True belonging and community comes from putting in the work to form IRL ties and memories with people you see over and over again, and that won’t happen if you’re always away from the city you live in.

Unfortunately, I’m a hypocrite. Despite the above opinion, I somehow always end up traveling, either for work or for fun. 2024 was no different. I visited the following countries this year:

Chile/Patagonia (W trek)
Argentina (Buenos Aires to recover after Patagonia)
Canada (trip to Newfoundland with family)
UK (London for a work offsite)
Portugal (Estoril for the Global Gathering conference)
Italy (Rome and Naples with a friend)
South of Spain (annual friend trip)
Ireland (Dublin for IETF 121)
India (family)

This was the first year I spent a significant amount of time in Europe (mid-September to early November, apart from a couple of weeks in the middle). It was overall pretty good except for Rome, which was breathtaking from start to finish. I’m still not over Rome. I loved Dublin too but I already knew I would given my Irish Christian Brother schooling; it felt familiar.

We didn’t do much traveling within India this December, which was fine given how many financial and domestic chores kept popping up. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time in Delhi meeting friends either, which probably extended my lifespan by a few months. The winter smoke has expanded well beyond Delhi to all of North India, even up to Shimla. Everything is covered in a haze: returning to SF felt like someone had turned on the high-definition setting. It was lovely spending an extended amount of time with family, like always. But every year working late-nights and early-mornings from India gets harder and harder.

Walking 🎒

I did a fair bit of backpacking this year. We did the W trek in Patagonia (Chile) in March, and then the Rae Lakes Loop in Sequoia/Kings Canyon. The latter was a lot harder than the former. Highly recommend Patagonia for anyone who likes hiking because you can really choose-your-own-adventure. I’ll never forget having fancily-plated poached salmon for dinner when the nearest hospital was 200 kilometers away. You can get away with not carrying anything on the hike except clothes, as long as you book things far enough in advance. It was also the right amount of crowded, and the views were spectacular. I do NOT recommend Rae Lakes for anyone who doesn’t like mosquitoes (literal CLOUDS), altitude sickness (my ancestors are embarrassed for me), controlled forest burning which meant we were breathing in smoke basically the entire way up (turned our snot all sorts of interesting colors) or bears (a baby bear smashed our car window and broke in). The views were beautiful though, probably even more so than Patagonia. If you live in California you never need to travel much for world-class nature.

I spent a fortune at REI this year. Totally worth it.

In general, I walked a lot this year. I wish Apple Health did a Spotify Wrapped-style post, but looking through my data, my biggest non-backpacking walk was a day in Rome where we did 32,000 steps in a day. I did about 38,000 steps on Day 3 of backpacking in Patagonia, which is approximately 30 kilometers at my average step length.

I joined a Walk Club in SF, which I haven’t gotten a chance to attend a whole lot because it clashes with yoga, but I’ve loved the walks I’ve been on because you also get to talk to new people while walking. I also did an impromptu “Stairs of San Francisco” walk on Juneteenth where I zig-zagged across the city, that was pretty fun. I want to do the SF Crosstown Trail in 2025.

Becoming a manager 🤓

This was my first year managing people as the lead for privacy, adblocking and webcompat teams at Brave browser. A lot happened quickly: my team grew by 50% and I had to lay someone off. As my team has grown larger I’ve found it harder to find the mental space to write big chunks of code. But I enjoy getting to set the technical direction and be deeply involved in technical privacy and webcompat things.

It’s been interesting seeing the politics behind how the sausage is made; the experience feels valuable. I just wish I had more slack time to think about how to deeply solve problems as opposed to ~all my time being Slack time.

Started hosting people more at home 🏠

I’ve always wanted an open-door home where friends feel welcome to just drop by without needing to provide notice. I love the aesthetic of easy familiarity. This requires a fairly high baseline level of tidiness in the home, and that requires constant work. Overall I feel we did a good job this year having our apartment be a default place to hang out.

We’ve had people drop by for movie nights, FIFA games, themed potlucks, Kashmiri dinners and friends’ engagement announcements. I especially loved all the dinner parties we hosted. We also did a couple of iterations of Dishoom potluck, where everyone makes a dish from the Dishoom cookbook. I made the chicken ruby and lamb keema, which were both delicious and educational. I got to actually try out those dishes IRL when I took my team to Dishoom Kensington for a work dinner in London, though their House Black Daal is the best item on the menu.

Food, books, movies, music 🍛📚🍿🎶

Top meals: We visited Aramburu in Buenos Aires for my birthday, in the aftermath of our Patagonia trip. Best meal I’ve ever had, hands down. Also the most expensive, but not by much. I’ve framed the menu in our apartment. The attention to detail, the flavors, the service and overall experience is everything I’ve looked for in Michelin-starred restaurants but never gotten until now. We did House of Prime Rib for a friend’s birthday again this year and it was fantastic yet again. I honestly like the steak better at HoPR than the one we had at La Cabrera (though HoPR did NOT throw in an entire bottle of champagne for free) in Buenos Aires after a 3 hour wait. HoPR is peak America: unfussy, friendly, high-quality and good-value spectacle.

I had a number of great meals in Ahmedabad this time, which was surprising because I’ve never really thought of Gujarat as a culinary destination. My current hottest food take is that Ahmedabad has better chana bhatura than Chandigarh; Chandigarh was pretty meh this time when it came to restaurants (though the bean-to-bar chocolate scene is popping). I wanted to try Naar (elevated Kashmiri food!) after hearing a lot about it but unfortunately the timing didn’t work out. On the topic of Kashmiri food, I made rogan josh for the first time this year after promising a friend that I’d make it for him if he didn’t order a generic version at a Goan (GOAN!) restaurant. I ended up making the dish twice more in a span of a month. Getting good goat meat in SF can be tricky but the frozen bag from Costco works in a pinch.

Top books: I finally got around to actually reading Chomsky this year instead of just summaries and excerpts. Understanding Power led me to the rest of his work. His books have been illuminating and I agree with his reasoning and conclusions except for the excessive moral judgment.

Annie Ernaux and Han Kang are other great authors I read for the first time this year, and want to read more of next year. I also enjoyed Victory City by Salman Rushdie which I reviewed here. I mostly spent a lot of time re-reading Elena Ferrante to keep pace while we were watching the HBO show, and can confidently say that the Neapolitan Novels are my all-time favourite books. I’ve been aggressively gifting the book at every opportunity, like a reverse and Italian Grinch.

Top movies: probably No Country For Old Men, that a friend made us watch for a movie club. To be honest, I didn’t like it right after watching it, but the more I reflected upon the themes the more it grew on me. I tried reading some Cormac McCarthy recently (Blood Meridian) and did not like the writing, but I see why that opinion is heresy amongst American literati. His obsessions are articulate and uniquely American.

I also adored Dune 2 obviously. Denis Villeneuve is a genius.

Top music: Definitely Hermanos Gutiérrez. I still remember hearing them for the first time: we were taking shelter from a downpour in Buenos Aires and then Cerca De Ti came on. I had to stop everything to ask what it was; the steel guitar was a revelation. It was great to see them live at The Greek just a few months after hearing them for the first time!

Things that didn’t go so well 👎

I still didn’t write or publish as much as I would’ve liked; I’m beginning to suspect I never will. I also didn’t play as much guitar as I would like, but I laid a lot of groundwork for this towards the latter end of the year by buying a new acoustic guitar and finally getting around to fixing my electric.

I also didn’t spend much time learning how to be more comfortable in the water, though this wasn’t a problem because we didn’t really do that many tropical or beach things this year. Perhaps 2025 will be the year of conquering water.