44
I recently turned 44, and this year resonates more than others for the simple fact that there are two repeating numbers. Other numbers that have come to mind are 22, 44, and 88.
At 22, I had just graduated from college with a computer science degree during a mild recession, so none of my friends had jobs. We all questioned our decisions to pursue this degree, but about six months later, most of us had landed jobs.
Our graduating class always had an informal pact to look out for each other if anyone got laid off or needed a job. In the present day, I think only 50% of my old cohort is still doing computer science–related work, as the other half have moved on to other fields.
Now at 44, career-wise, I never would have guessed the impact artificial intelligence (AI) would have on my field. To give an example, five days of work that I would have done as a junior engineer at 22 can now take some of these models about 5 minutes to complete.
I’m greatly concerned about this disruption because the junior job market is probably the worst I’ve seen in 20 years. No companies are really hiring junior developers because AI can do most of their work. The problem we’ll see in the next 20 years is that if no juniors are being trained now, who will become the next senior engineers to guide these information technology systems? In a world without apprentices, who becomes the master?
This was also the time I started to learn how to cook. I had moved out under the watchful eye of my parents, and in the kitchen made a ton of mistakes. I remember buying ground turkey, and was surprised it turned bad after 7 days. Cooking is harder than it looks because you’re balancing so many dimensions at once.
Examples of some dimensions are the five tastes (salty, sweet, sour, bitter, umami), plus managing texture, temperature, cook time, ingredient size, knife technique, and the appropriate heat type (sauté, steam, bake, broil, grill, etc.).
I also would never have imagined that at 44, my dad wouldn’t be around. We sometimes like to think of our parents as superheroes, but there comes a time when we have to reckon with the inevitable. I have few regrets in our relationship, as we traveled a lot with my parents and my partner over the past 10 years. However one thing that comes to mind is I wish I had stored some of his voicemails to me.
He never really texted much, but he would call and leave voicemails to see how I was doing and remind me to do things like call Mom for her birthday. I have quite a lot of pictures of him, but there’s something different about hearing a message just left for me.
At times I find myself slipping into similar mannerisms as him. Sometimes when I slouch I catch myself sitting straight and remind myself that is what he did often.
My mom is also slowing down a little bit—not because of health issues, but just age. I’ve noticed she’s walking a little more slowly and gingerly, but she’s still pretty active, playing tennis at least once a week and going to the gym often as well.
I wonder as we grow up how much of our parents’ personalities distill into ours. When we would eat out at restaurants, my mom always would mention how she could make that dish at home. And in restaurants, I find myself saying the same thing.
As for myself physically speaking, I find playing sports a little more challenging on my body now. There is always a weird shoulder pinch, or muscle sore that takes much longer to go away. To help alleviate this, I rotate seeing my chiropractor, physiotherapist, and massage therapist. I’ve been to a lot of dicey massages living in Southern California, and it is a world of difference going to a session of someone who is actually licensed.
My physiotherapist gave me an analogy that doing some sport, like playing tennis or swimming, is withdrawing from the bank, and going to the gym is depositing in the bank. I get lazy doing strength training, but since I’m losing muscle mass at a rate of 3% per year, working out in the gym is something I should do more of.
In terms of my life philosophy I roughly ascribe to the principles of an Adventist program called NEWSTART.
N – Nutrition
E – Exercise
W – Water
S – Sunlight (though I’m pretty sure the authors never thought about northern climates in the winter)
T – Temperance – originally targeting alcohol and tobacco, but definitely the new topic du jour is technology addiction
A – Air
R – Rest
T – Trust in God
Thinking about the future and the number 88 made me think of a video a friend made:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JJUyUGjfcg
The premise was that a Post-it note represents a year, and when visualizing the arc of our lives, most of our time is spent working. Having goals and aspirations is important, but even more important is being happy in the moment.
Nobody wants to think about what we’ve done over the arc of our lives, but events like tragedy and loss force us to reflect on it.
What does it feel to be 44 or to look 44? That’s kind of a difficult thing to say. I think age is more psychological than anything, but I do feel there is discrimination on how you look depending on your profession.
For example in tech, older people are sometimes discriminated against. When you interview for jobs, people sometimes assume that you are too slow to handle the fast changing pace of tech. Strange, right? In almost all other disciplines, age and experience are treasured assets conveying a sense of wisdom, yet in tech, you’re sometimes assumed to be too slow for the fast-changing pace
Do I mentally feel younger than 44? I think so. Many of the people I play sports with are younger (and often beat me), which keeps me on my toes. At church, lots of my friends are younger than I am, which helps me feel younger too.
Obsession
One of my friends’ families recently moved back to Canada after a year and a half of living in Saudi Arabia for work. We caught up for dinner with his family, and despite quite a long time passing, the conversation wasn’t awkward. It’s always interesting how we can pick up the last thread with friends despite long gaps of time.
For dinner, we ate Korean BBQ at 5 p.m., and the whole place was packed. I’ve noticed that since the pandemic, restaurants are quite crowded much earlier than usual, and I thought the early dinner trend would only be temporary.
After the dinner catch-up, my friend’s family left, and we went grocery shopping. We noticed a new soy milk store called Yuan Soy Food. Every day they make fresh soy milk and tofu pudding (in Chinese – tau foo fah – 豆腐花 – and also in Vietnamese – tàu hủ nước đường). I had this dish a lot as a kid from Vietnamese markets, and it’s quite similar since it probably came from China.
The dish is a soft tofu pudding topped with either a ginger syrup sauce or a Vietnamese variation made with pandan and coconut milk.
When cooking, I go through phases of getting obsessed with a dish and not being satisfied until I’ve cooked it perfectly. I blame—or attribute—this to how computer science has influenced how I think about things.
In computer science, code must execute perfectly or it doesn’t work. Programming languages have a concept of grammar, like English, but code only works if perfect syntax and rules are followed. If not, the code won’t run at all, so you need 100% precision. With modern editors, this rarely happens anymore, but I remember a time when my code worked perfectly in the development environment but kept failing in production. I had a configuration file that looked like this:
development:
host: dev.example.local
production:
host: prod.example.comI was banging my head, thinking my code was broken, but the problem turned out to be this:
development:
host: dev.example.local
production:
host: prod.example.com<space>In my configuration file, the framework crashed because there was a space after the hostname. It’s these annoying little details where obsession and precision are required to see why things work and to solve problems.
When I cook, I carry over these same methodologies from engineering. Now the task: how do I make tau foo fah?
The first question is: what is tau foo fah exactly? We know it’s soy milk. The next question is: how is soy milk made?
That in itself starts the rabbit hole. It’s impractical to cook things from scratch when we can just buy them from the store, but there’s a kind of intrigue and satisfaction in knowing the roots of a dish—how far you can trace it back. It’s really no different than debugging a code stack trace and tracking the details until you get to the top.
First, you start with soybeans. You soak them in water overnight, then optionally rub off the skins. You blitz them in a blender, then cook the mixture on the stovetop, and strain it with a sieve. Fun fact: in Taiwan and many other Asian countries, they use Canadian soybeans specifically to make high-quality soy milk and tofu.
The liquid part is the soy milk, and the fiber part is called okara in Japanese. The problem is that making soy milk generates a lot of soybean byproduct, and you can only eat so much of it.
To add some complexity, certain cultures—like Korean-style soy milk—change the order: they blitz the soaked soybeans and water, strain it, then cook it. I find this style a little lighter than cooking the whole pulpy mass together.
Now with soy milk, you have several options. To make Japanese-style tofu, you heat the soy milk to 170 degrees and add nigari (magnesium chloride) in two stages. There are these strange instructions which tell you to “stir the coagulant in a figure 8, only 20 times” for the first run, and then in the second coagulation, “stir in the coagulant once in a figure 8”. One day I was curious and asked ChatGPT Deep Research to find some academic papers and it turns out there is actually science behind some of these traditions.
Once the soy milk starts coagulating, similar to ricotta cheese, you scoop out the curds and gently press them together in a tofu strainer. The firmness of the tofu—medium or firm—depends on how long it’s pressed.
For tofu pudding, you can use different coagulants: nigari (the same used for tofu), food-grade gypsum (calcium sulfate), or glucono delta-lactone (GDL). I’ve experimented with all of these, and nigari is pretty much my favorite of the batch.
To summarize:
- Soybeans + water → blitz -> cook strain → Soy milk
- Soy milk + coagulant → pressing curds = Tofu
- Soy milk + coagulant → low-temperature steam = Tofu pudding (tau foo fah)
Some of this begs the question: if tofu is just soy milk, is its nutritional composition the same as drinking the equivalent amount of soy milk? It’s kind of weird that tofu starts out as a liquid, but I suppose that’s no different from cheese—where large amounts of milk are used to make something like ricotta.
End to end, it takes about three hours to make tofu from scratch—and only about $3 to buy it from the store.
I go through these obsession phases in cooking where I do something over and over until I understand and get it right. I went through a French Macaron phase a while back (fun fact, I’ve made them so much I don’t enjoy them anymore), a ramen making phase, a corn tortilla making phase (still in progress).
My cooking style is totally impractical. During the week I find myself making the most complicated items and sometimes I’m just like, I should just stir-fry some chicken and get done with it. But no, instead it is buying a whole chicken, deboning it, making stock out of the bones, and then marinating the chicken, then cooking it.
I might have mentioned this before, but what has really helped my cooking, is keeping a journal. Since the pandemic, I have created a personal wiki where I have written down every recipe I have created, with photos, and a change log. I found that the act of writing, and seeing how things worked in the past has greatly helped move the discipline of cooking forward in my life.
Maybe I do this because it is my counter-balance to staring at a screen all day. Cooking isn’t coding though, and I would attest cooking is so much harder. You have variables which are constantly changing like the changing quality of the ingredients, your spices, and the weather. A dish you cook once, will slightly be different maybe because ingredients also fluctuate in quality and flavor. I think the only way to get better at cooking is simply just to practice, and maybe obsess about it a little.
Museum of Ancient Greek Technology by Kotsanas
Earlier this year, we went to Greece and visited the islands of Mykonos, Santorini, and Heraklion. Santorini was surprisingly quiet because many tourists had canceled their trips after a week-long series of small earthquakes in March. Locals said the media exaggerated the situation so much that it scared visitors away—tourism that summer was said to be worse than during the pandemic.
Our last island stop was Heraklion, where we randomly wandered into a small Museum of Ancient Greek Technology. I didn’t expect much, but it turned out to be fascinating—filled with working models of inventions from as early as the 5th century BC.
The one that completely amazed me was something called Philon’s Automatic Servant from the 3rd century BC. It was essentially the world’s first robot—a life-sized mechanical woman designed to serve drinks. When you placed a cup in her left hand, she would automatically pour wine from a jug in her right hand, then add water to mix it.
Inside, she had two sealed containers—one for wine and one for water—connected by clever tubes and air pipes. When a cup pressed down on her hand, it triggered air pressure that let the liquids flow in sequence: first wine, then water. Once the cup was full, the hand lifted slightly and the flow stopped. If you removed the cup midway, everything stopped immediately.
It was an ancient machine that used air pressure, balance, and gravity to act like a human servant—over 2,000 years before modern robotics even existed.
I wonder what our society would be like today if we weren’t driven by a capitalist system, and instead had all the time, like the Greeks did back then, to just focus on inventions and tinker. Can you imagine, that instead of worrying about money, there was no 9-5? Or maybe we didn’t have five-day work week? What would you do if you had all the time in the world to pursue any interest? Would you be motivated if you didn’t have to worry about money?
Sometimes we think that the systems we have in place are those which will stick around forever, but history tells us that probably capitalism will not last forever in its current from and something new will come in its place.
There has been much discussion about what happens if human level artificial general intelligence (AGI) permeates throughout society. Some define it when an AI system by itself can do a better job than a human.
Right now we specifically are using AI as a tool at work for engineering, but the concern is what would happen if AI began to do mass job displacements in society. Currently as mentioned, software engineers are first on the chopping block, then perhaps call centers in the future, and who knows what next.
You can check out more here:
Fanny Crosby
At church, I was asked to give a short devotional (a short message) on something related to Fanny Crosby. She was a pretty famous hymn writer for her time period, and before writing the devotional, I decided to do some research.
I found that she wrote an autobiography at age 85 and decided to read it. I was expecting a pretty boring book — I did not expect what I read.
The story starts 200 years ago, when she was born in 1820. At six weeks old, she had swollen eyes, and the regular family physician couldn’t come. Another physician came and put some substance in her eyes, and she became blind.
At 85, she stated that through all those years, “she has never felt a spark of resentment against him, because I have always believed from my youth to this very moment that the good Lord, in His infinite mercy, by this means consecrated me to the work that I am still permitted to do.”
Reading about life in the 1800s is quite fascinating. She was amazed by trains and mentioned:
“In the present era, with its many modes of rapid transit, one is quite liable to forget that most of them have come into being within less than fifty years, and I am sometimes amazed at the thought that not until after I was born did the first locomotive turn a wheel on this Western continent. When I ride in the mighty express trains that fly across the country, how marvelous it seems!”
She was adamant about getting an education, so she left rural New York and attended the New York Institute of the Blind at 15. There, she learned a precursor to braille, using a system of embossed print letters.
You have to remember, in the 1820s and 30s there was no social media back then, so one of the main forms of entertainment was poetry.
Five years into her time at the New York Institute, she became good — like really good — to the point she could feel pride starting to get to her head. She was basically the Taylor Swift or Beyoncé of poets in her day.
There were even echoes of epidemics like ours, as she talked about her experience living through the spread of cholera in 1848:
“For many months, while the black cloud now seemed to be hanging over the defenseless towns of America, we hoped that we might be spared from its ravages, but I think the cholera reached New York in March or April of 1849. At first it was confined to the lower part of the city, where the authorities tried vigorously to stamp it out, meanwhile endeavoring to keep the matter as quiet as possible for fear of unduly alarming the people.”
It’s interesting that, despite being 200 years apart, history seems to repeat itself.
She ended up becoming very famous — she read her poetry in front of the U.S. Congress, met four U.S. presidents in her lifetime, and was friends with President Cleveland (#22).
In the 1800s, she lived to be 95, which was incredible — more than double the average lifespan of her time. Today, that would be like someone living to 150 years old.
She wrote around 8,000 hymns over her lifetime. As for her writing process, she said, “Most of my poems have been written during the long night watches, when the distractions of the day could not interfere with the rapid flow of thought.”
It’s interesting that her timeless advice about being productive centers on minimizing distractions, advice we could heed today. There is something about stillness, silence, and being by yourself to help process and think through thoughts.