Happy the Year of Rabbit
I started my career at Google more than 10 years ago in New York. My then manager asked us to set personal OKRs. I wrote “visit the Chicago office" so I could spend more time with my wife in Chicago. They were very supportive. The entire org cared us, and sincerely put our career in priority. Every Friday 7:30PM we ate pizza and watched founders' TGIFs hosted in California. It was an unconventional company.
The day before this Luna New Year's Eve, I was waken up by my wife around 2:30AM telling me to check my email. We are still not sure how she woke up exactly minutes after the email. It was difficult to process when sleep deprived. Heck it would probably take a really long time to digest everything. We are still celebrating the New Year and the Spring Festival. I don't know how I would feel going back to work on Monday. One thing became obvious, it is now just a conventional company. After the founders left, you can feel it stronger every year.
I can still enjoy working on my team and enjoy the work I do. But I start to question the long term purpose of it. I guess I set my 2023’s theme to be the Year of Purpose for a reason. I hope I can figure it out.
I'm upset. Happy the Year of Rabbit.
∞ Twitterrific: End of an Era
Twitterrific has been discontinued.
A sentence that none of us wanted to write, but have long felt would need to be written someday. We didn’t expect to be writing it so soon, though, and certainly not without having had time to notify you that it was coming. We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.
🫡
∞ The Shit Show
Craig Hockenberry writes:
What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in their ongoing shit show.
But I guess that’s what you should expect from a shitty person.
Personally, I’m done. And with a vengeance.
First, arrogant bastards love seeing their names on tweets and other media. I want to starve him of the things that money can’t buy: respect and attention. Do the same by simply ignoring him and his kingdom.
A thousand times yes. Do not give clowns the attention.
Sunsetting VR Planet Defense for iOS
I noticed that VR Planet Defense is completely broken on iOS 16. (Well, not completely, you can still view ads or check the leaderboards 😅)
The game was built by a really old version of Unity, and the last update was Jun 17, 2018. Fixing won't be easy. So I made a decision today to remove it from App Store. I'll keep the Play Store version a bit longer though since it still works.
I had a lot of fun building a VR game for Google Cardboard. Maybe I could get back to it some day.
2023: Year of Purpose
I was tidying up my home office area the other day, and found a bunch of things I haven't touched for years. The first thing came to my mind was of course Marie Kondo's Spark Joy principle. But a lot of things in the past 3 years no long spark joy, yet they are still used often. This no longer works.
Then I changed the question to, does this thing have a purpose in my life? It worked surprisingly well. I got rid of many things and kept others. I came up future projects that can make some of them more useful. Promising.
2022 is also coming to an end. It means it's time for my 3rd attempt to a yearly theme. As you have already read the title, 2023 is going to be my Year of Purpose. The past 3 years have also worn down our life's purpose. It's time to bring it back. Let's move past this and look forward to a more purposeful year.
What's your yearly theme?
Community Building
- There are now 40+ folks in my Mango Baby discord community. It's mostly people asking support questions and me answering them. Occasionally, users also help with each other, and I love see more of that.
- Increasingly, I don't feel Mastodon is for me. I'll keep checking and posting since there are a lot of activities moved from the bird site I'm interested in. But for now, I won't bother finding a better host.
- My Micro.blog site continues to function, and I'm also back on Tumblr. Maybe t2 can succeed, or it's best to end social media.
Should I Branch Out?
I randomly posted a Reel of a squirrel eating a pine cone and got 431 likes. I don't know maybe I should branch out.
I'm terrible at language arts, maybe text isn't really for me after all.
Today is really a sad day.
I wrote my own blogging engine for mangoumbrella.com/blog. Currently it crossposts to Twitter. I should add Mastodon too.
While researching, I think another, maybe better, option is to add ActivityPub support to my blog. This way, Mastodon instances can directly talk to my blog. Folks on Mastodon can directly follow my blog. This is certainly an intriguing idea.
I'm taking a step further today.
git commit -m "Drop the bird link."
Posting on your own website doesn't just mean to own your content, it also pushes yourself to think deliberately before any post. They are no longer the raw first thoughts, but words that went through your digestive system.