Putting together a personal “year-in-review” at the end of each year has become one of my favorite annual rituals. Here’s 2025’s:
January – March
- Later in January, headed up to Sacramento for a day to attend my UCLA roommate’s graduation from the California Highway Patrol Academy. If you’re ever driving in the East Bay, keep an eye out for him on the freeways. I unfortunately did not receive a get-out-of-jail-free card.
April – June
- Kicked off April with the “annual” long-distance cycling trip, now in its second year. Alex and Elliot flew out from New York to join Cooper and me out west. We started in Monterey and covered the miles we skipped last year — down Highway 1, past the Bixby Bridge to Pfeiffer State Park, then continuing on until we hit the roadblock just north of Regent’s Slide. To get around the closure, we went inland, through Carmel Valley over to the Salinas Valley. After a night in King City, we headed back to the coast via a gorgeous, grueling climb over the recently-reopened Nacimiento–Fergusson Road, then popped up to the southern end of the slide before turning around and heading south once more, past Cambria and Morro Bay to SLO.
- The Thursday after Easter, after multiple months of weekly morning rides up Hawk Hill, the line at Arsicault Bakery on Clement and Arguello was finally short enough that I decided to stop in and see what the fuss was all about. I got a chocolate croissant. It was absolutely delectable.
- After Hawaii, the family headed to LA to celebrate my brother’s graduation from USC. Perhaps as expected, it was a higher-budget production than UCLA’s. There was a very cool drone show.
- In mid-June, packed up the essentials and drove down to San Diego, where I officially started working on Harbor with Albert, my cofounder and good friend from Michigan. Leveraging Albert’s deep experience in the medtech space, we’re building software to run clinical trials more quickly and efficiently.
July – September
- Caldera launched its token. Was very exciting to see the post-TGE staking smart contract I wrote securing double-digit millions of dollars in assets at its peak.
- Published an npm package with some bits of code I wrote for efficient list reordering in the Harbor web application. It is now depended on by the tldraw project and (as of this writing) has been downloaded over 200,000 times.
- Attended my high school cross country team’s alumni meet in August. Ran just a bit slower than last year; happy I wasn’t too much slower!
October – December
- Paid UCLA another $130 to get the most recent year’s grade distribution data from the Records office and uploaded them to uclagrades.com, a site I created a few years ago for students to visualize course grades. The site now averages about 50,000 pageviews per month and peaks at 200,000+ monthly during enrollment periods (still hosted for free on Vercel, for now… but I may need to upgrade soon).
- After a little over four months of continuous building (on pretty much a 10-10-7 schedule), we (i.e., Harbor Labs LLC) closed our first customer at the end of October — a midsize medtech in San Diego — and recognized our first revenue in November.
- In mid-November, we applied to YC and got an interview. We flew up to SF and met some of the partners in person in their office in the Dogpatch.
- Unfortunately, we did not get into YC this time. They told us they wanted to see more revenue and live usage in a real study with real subjects (as of this writing, our first customers are designing their initial study schemas on our platform but no studies are live with subjects yet). We will get this done and apply again in the spring.
- Moved to a new place in Point Loma to be closer to the beach and to the airport.
2026
One of the highlights of putting together these “years in review” — besides going through my photos and reliving all the memories from the past 365 days — is reading what I wrote last year and seeing how the current year played out against my expectations.
To friends in San Francisco: Albert’s place in San Diego has been a refreshing change of scenery these past few months. This city is quieter; I feel more focused; the weather is better, too. But there are many moments when I find myself missing the city; I still keep a room ready in the old Cole Valley flat for whenever I’ll be back. I’m not exactly sure when that will be, but if things play out next year the way we’re hoping them to, we might just be back. I’ll see you then.
