🌳 beginning again
on traveling, sabbatical life, and the recurse center
I
Back in 2022, after over a decade of being undocumented, I wrote that I was finally on a pathway to citizenship. In the following months after publishing that piece, I continued walking down that path: on December 16, 2022, I submitted the concurrent filing of my I-140 immigration petition and I-485 adjustment of status. And after 98 days, on March 24, 2023, I received my Form I-551. This presented a Permanent Resident Card. A Green Card.
My legal counsel mentioned that this was the fastest I-485 approval they had ever received. According to the USCIS, the FY2023 median wait time for employment-based I-485 applications was 8.6 months, or about 262 days. Given the complex circumstances of the 245(i) adjustment alongside my DACA status, my application’s extraordinary speed of processing was surprising. I am forever thankful that my case was shepherded through.
With my adjusted status came new privileges. The first privilege was the freedom of movement to enter and exit the United States.
I started to travel abroad in 2024. As a baby step, I hopped across the border to Vancouver, Canada to learn skiing at Whistler. I learned of the monotony of the international re-entry lines back into America. Then, I made another step, this time on a trip with the lads across the pond to the United Kingdom. I learned the pain of acquiring tourist visas: most European countries do not offer visa-free travel for a Philippine passport.
A third trip took me to Korea and my homeland, the Philippines. I met my mother’s side of the family for the first time in over twenty years. If a good provider is one who leaves, I learned what they had left behind.
The second privilege was the freedom of employment: for the first time, I could think about work with a true freedom of choice. On October 2024, I left my role to take a sabbatical. In my heart, I felt that it was time to begin again. I followed my heart.
II
In the time since the start of my sabbatical, I've had a few fun experiences:
While visiting San Francisco, I had a euphoria-infused religious experience at a Zedd concert. I now understand why many of my friends enjoy raving.
Although misshapen Brooklyn sidewalks ravaged my ankle in the days prior, I could not be stopped from finishing my first century, cycling from Poughkeepsie back to Manhattan on the Empire State Trail.
After visiting Seoul, I had a brief fling with a Korean perm before I couldn't take it anymore: she was so high maintenance. In praise of Felix from Stray Kids, I instead donned a short haired variant of a dirty blonde wolf cut.
I enjoyed the modern luxuries of Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hakone. I'll especially remember the double hitter of visiting FULLCOUNT's Harajuku store and eating at the incredible Esoragoto Udon down the alley. After reaching 30,000 steps that day, the combo of eating dandan and wagyu udon noodles was so heavenly.
I spent half a month in New Zealand, mostly in South Island. Starting in Christchurch, I made way to Aoraki/Mount Cook, Wānaka, and the Fiordland. I rarely drive, so this trip has basically constituted over 90% of my lifetime driving mileage. My new fun fact now is that I was born in the Philippines, raised in the United States, and learned to drive in New Zealand.
I feel lucky to enjoy my new freedoms; I know that I have exercised them at exactly the right times; and I believe I deserve it all: these small reaffirmations keep me whole. The Russian painter Wassily Kadinsky said that "[a]ll methods are sacred if they are internally necessary." I chose a singular path to reach spiritually stable ground. In retrospect, I would chose this same journey again and again. All of its sorrows and joys have made me.
I found a similar sentiment that resided on the walls of the west transept of the Stanford Memorial Church, where an inscription reads: "There are but few on earth free from cares, none but carry burdens of sorrow, and if all were asked to make a package of their troubles, and throw this package on a common pile, and then were asked to go and choose a package which they were willing to bear, all would select their own package again. Your heartaches may be great, burdens heavy, but look about you, and with whom would you change?"
III
By March 2025, I had felt re-energized to assess where I wanted to be in my next role. I started with a couple of insights:
From my previous experience at a developer tools company, I internalized a key belief: the strength of a product can only be realized when built on top of a great platform, and vice versa.
In my mind, (1) requires the abilities of a systems engineer who can execute with both depth and breath across the stack. But while I was well versed in executing and coordinating product initiatives, I felt an internal resistance to the deeper engineering challenges of scaling infrastructure. I wanted examine this mental block and strengthen my foundations here.
When considering opportunities at organizations, I was forcing my goals upon them, rather than searching for existing alignment of the organization's goals and my goals.
Instead of searching for a single opportunity to satisfy my objectives, maybe I could instead find a composition of multiple opportunities.
It took me a while to get to (3). For me, internalizing Reid Hoffman's concept of "tours of duty" to solidified this into belief. A similar belief was brought up in a recent episode of Patrick McKenzie's Complex Systems. Mikey Dickerson, the first administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, said, "If the institution you wanna help is not already receptive, you cannot make it receptive." Coincidentally, this sentiment was captured under a section in the transcript titled "Tour of duty recommendation."
Mentally, with (2) and (4), I'm at this place right now where I want to deepen my relationship with my technical abilities. I wanted a dedicated environment to do this, with similar folks occupying the same headspace. Community has been very important for me in my immigration work and athletic endeavors. I want similar magic to work for my programming pursuits!
In the midst of all this, I saw Nolen Royalty's One Million Chessboards. Some of his inspiration came from the Recurse Center, a community described as a writer’s retreat, but for programmers. That same inspiration that I desired was flowing through me as well: If Nolen could do the hard task of redefining the game of chess, I could do the easier task of redefining my relationship with programming. I got straight to writing my application.
A day before the start of Recurse Center's initial summer batch of residents, I was happy to manifest entry into the program. My next manifestation is akin to that of Chayenne Zhao, a member of the SGLang core team: I wanted to claw my way through to the intersection of machine learning and systems work.
I’m five weeks into my six week batch. So far, I've been mostly participating in readings and discussions, following courses like MIT's 6.5840 on distributed systems, Stanford's CS336 on language modeling from scratch, and Karpathy's lectures on neural networks. I love our little working groups so much!
The most tangible artifacts of this progress is building parts of training a language model, including a tokenizer and a modern rendition of the Transformer model architecture. I'll be documenting more of my progress once my batch ends.
Building artifacts under some course structure is nice, but in the future, I want to build something else from scratch without a tutorial. The current idea in my mind is a toy inference engine like vLLM or SGLang that's compatible with Mac's Neural Engine. After a search of similar re-creations, a lightweight implementation of vLLM by a Deepseek engineer came up. That project only released this June and had a ton of traction, so I'm happy my intuition for fun engineering problems has some validation.
It's been fun building up new knowledge again on my own terms. It is so wonderful to begin again.