2021 — 2022

Hi! You and I may be friends or family. We might be Twitter buddies (and we should). We could be neighbors across the street or across the cities. We might be passing acquaintances or going way back. It's really nice for you and me, for us to chat again, even if it's just with this letter.

Who am I again? Well, aside from the blatantly branded card that brought you here today, there's absolutely no way to know that I am Ryan Rampersad. I might be that annoying advice-giver or that quirky branding guy with long hair and weird red ribbon, or that Twitter-enthusiast or that alleged technical expert. You bet. That's me.

Who is that adorable dog? That's Roxy! Roxy is 11 this year! What kind of dog is Roxy? That's a great question. Here's how the story goes: she comes from my mom's cousin's farm where two dogs went into the barn and puppies came out. Allegedly, she is a terrier and beagle mix. She likes our usual neighborhood walks, but she loves going for an adventure. She's getting older, so she overheats in the hot summers, and she can't walk quite as far. But that's OK since she always does her best. I describe all of the featured activities and experiences with the photo legend on the card.

OK, what's up with this card? These cards have been delivered to fine folks everywhere since the legendary year of 2016. It's mythical because... the casual-though-appropriate way of describing it is, "I don't know, I think I became an adult." Many years ago, I felt a great need to share my gratitude and thank you. That's the collective you, and it's also the individual you, reading this. No matter if you're burning the midnight oil with me on the regular, hanging out in the park with Roxy and me, or in another country away, making the world a better place. Thank you. You're incredible. I am so lucky to have you in my life, and I think I can write here; the world is fortunate to have you too.

If this is your first card, welcome. If you have received a card before, welcome back, and thank you for reading again. I hope to continue into the distant future.

I want to share my thanks and some additional musings from this year with you with this letter.

I think about taste all the time. The subjective kind of taste judges what is beautiful, proper, valuable, and ideal. Chance and whim influence taste. Your taste makes you unique and more than just thought.

Many people associate taste with visual design, but there's more. There's interior design, industrial design, fashion design, user interface design, engineering design, and many more kinds of design. We like narrowing that down for some design practices more than others. But it's all design. Though, taste isn't limited to design; it's more innate than that.

For all of the common Zipfian doodads and gizmos your design needs, there is eventually some thingamajig that requires novelty. We like reaching for these canned ideas and concepts encapsulating a shared vision. We want to reach for the "good parts," a viable and nominal approach. What happens when we need that novelty? Then it's time for taste.

When you code, you write it with some logic in mind. Your taste scaffolds what you write. Perhaps your code is terse because your taste guided you towards this compromise. Maybe it's flexible and interchangeable because you feel like it's going to change. Perhaps you relied on the heralded design patterns. You used your taste to scaffold. Taste is experience, but it is a judgment of fundamentals too. Maybe your taste lured you into a new place, where you created novelty.

Most of my practical work is at the crossroads of technology and design. I chose my label, and I am a technologist. I am not a designer—probably, but I could play one on TV. Many folks conflate design in the abstract as the antithesis of the technical. But it's not. It's not just all rules and regulations that make all of this; it is creative work.

Taste is a spectrum.

There's this famous quote I share with my direct reports and team members, especially junior folks. It's long, but here it is.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take awhile. It's normal to take awhile. You've just gotta fight your way through.

― Ira Glass

When I work with juniors, I feel their frustration. They're disappointed. They work for so long and so hard on this thing, and then it ends up mediocre. If they're lucky, it ends up good enough. It lacks the special secret sauce they see marketed to them thousands of times every day. Their taste lured them towards making this thing, but their taste also recognizes their creation as inadequate so far. Staring back at the facet of imposter syndrome is the first step. Keep going; that is every step after.

For others, I feel that the taste has fled from them. It is like how your parents used to say cheerily with a beaming grin, "you get less creative as you get older," as an inevitable taunt. I consider the frustration of their beguiling biases plunging towards complacency. So unquestionable of the beginning and so unequivocal of the outcome. Take these sanctimonious strategies, perfidious policies, and acrimonious accommodations. It's all a commodity now. You only need this recipe; just follow the rules. Their taste has left no room for je ne sais quoi.

Taste is a spectrum.

You might not have taste yet. That's not an unrecoverable position. Find what you think is beautiful and proper. Get out of your existing grooves. Follow others with taste. Don't rush. Don't deliberately dwell. Take the time. When your taste is palpable, it's practice and perseverance from there.

You might have good taste but make lousy stuff. You are already doing well if this is your only problem. With practice and perseverance, you can keep going. Then learning builds knowledge, hones skills. You can make things and enjoy them. You will refine your taste too.

You might have poor taste. Your journey from poor taste to good taste is much more arduous. Fixing that requires personal reflection. You are changing your personal attributes. Stop outsourcing your opinions. Stop reaching for the fruits of the canned ideas and select your own. That's the challenge.

How is your taste today?

Last year, I planned ahead and created a document to track various topics I could write about in this letter. Eventually, I collected a few prompts, but they were rather bland. The crux of the matter is that I forgot this section's topic. Instead, I found a new topic almost as good, almost entirely as a byproduct. Poof. Gone.

Uh, what was I talking about?

Oh, right, it's remembering.

I wrote a blog back in college, and I committed to it daily, or at least weekly. It revolved around programming topics. Leading up to college, through my senior year in high school, I was programming daily, partially for class, primarily for myself: valuable functions, exciting concepts, and especially error messages and their solutions. I kept all of that on the blog.

I was a kid with at least ten fewer experiences than today. Now I think that my writing was the spitting image of cringe-worthy embarrassment. Embarrassment aside, the content was the core component, while the flowery mumbo-jumbo was superfluous. One might argue nothing has changed there.

Back in the day (circa 2011), my first course in my Computer Science program was in Scheme. I think the University chose Scheme as a great equalizer. Students coming in from advanced placement courses could already program in C++ or Java with comfort, and hobbyists might have written enough code to catch up just the same. But nobody knew Scheme.

Being the engineering student I was, I looked at the URL for our lab assignments and uncovered the course reused them from a previous semester. I might have judiciously borrowed those old lab assignment prompts. Often, I was working at least a lab or so ahead of the class. Remember, I had that blog? I preserved notes of errors I encountered while working ahead of the coursework. I wrote about some of these errors to help myself remember and others. Or the was the plan anyway.

Here's the kicker. While in the computer lab one afternoon, I glanced up, and I was amazed by what I saw. My flagrant branding was on the giant monitor the next row up from mine. Two kids huddled together, sharing that screen, studying a post about fixing an error they encountered in Scheme.

Maybe you had to be there. The revelation that my self-serving endeavor helped someone else. Helping your typical internet stranger is normal, but helping your local peers, that was a remarkable occurrence. Here I am, years later, thinking about it still, and this revelation has been a lasting impression.

I don't know about you, but there's a lot of odds and ends you accumulate. There are a lot of tools, quirks, tricks, and bugs stacked upon bugs. Where do you keep all your functional notes? There are notes for tasks; you might store those in Keep or OneNote. Then there are notes that project crystalized knowledge back into your memory. Where do you keep these notes?

How many searches do you do every day? How many messages do you fire into the #questions channel in Slack every week? How many hashtags do you query on Twitter every month? Most likely, quite a few.

Becoming an encyclopedia should not be the goal. I prefer to model myself after a web, a grand associator of knowledge and expertise. I wonder what kind of web is my inspiration. Spiders, how spooky.

Anyway, where was I going with this?

While out on a walk with Roxy the other month, I had an excellent idea for this letter. The idea was extraordinary, and the letter was the perfect place for it. Except, the fantastic idea I had evaporated from my mind as Roxy and I turned the corner. Those neurons were busy being thrilled and suddenly- squirrel, those neurons are busy doing something else now. Idea, gone.

After that, when I have my phone with me on walks, I turn on my recording app and dictate the idea if something comes to me. Writing it down is ideal, but getting a windy voice recording of those ephemeral ideas is better than nothing and better than forgetting.

That original blog is retired. Successor blogs tried to blossom, but apathy thwarts most attempts at thriving. It's a shame, though. In the course of daily work and life over the years, I come across a useful utility or a convincing concept or a sublime service or a tactful tool or a surprising solution, and I wish I had written them down. For every one of those instances, I think back. I knew I had something valuable to record, but it got away from me again.

If I had continued my regular writings to today, how many times could I have encountered the same gratifying experience?

Write that blog. Write it for yourself now, write it for your future self and write it for everyone.

What can you do in ten years?

Remember, we were just talking about college.

This story begins just about ten years ago now, back in college. One of my good friends and I were doing our usual blathering about technology in the park nearby. We did this historically, and we invariably talked for hours about tech in some form. We thought we should record this during our blathering at some point that evening. We returned home, and I grabbed my pristine new-for-college MacBook Air, and we headed down into the basement. With Garage Band and after faffing about for an hour, we recorded our first ten-minute audio segment. We named it "Fled Across The Desert" after the first chapter in one of our favorite books. We accidentally made the first episode of a podcast. Incidentally, I posted it to my blog, just like everything else. Then we did it again the following week. And the week after that. A few weeks later, we had a few more episodes recorded. We needed a name.

They say naming things is one of the two most challenging things in computer science, right up there with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.

I wish I could tell you our prototype names from our brainstorming sessions. We had a giant whiteboard full of logo sketches and name amalgamations. I wish I could, but it's classified. Alas, that's not the focus of this story. When we were on the verge of deciding, while my friends thought we were five-by-five clear, I made a last-minute executive decision to reverse course and decided on another name. The decision was heartfelt because there was a significant compromise, while the choice was an excellent name.

The Nexus was born. The compromise was the domain name, "the-nexus.tv." It hurt me to my core to own and operate a domain with a dash, clashing with every fiber of taste that I have. One of our significant milestones was, and I love this campaign's name, "Defeating The Dash." We put a watch out on the owner of the dashless variant, and we marked our calendars. We counted down the days. Eventually, we were lucky, and we got it.

Just under 1400 episodes later, somehow, The Nexus still exists. Is it as influential as dreamed of in the early days? Perhaps not. My goal for The Nexus was to act as the foil to our lives.

In 2021, on November 13th, we reached another incredible milestone. The Nexus turned ten. Now, I know what you are thinking. Where is the pomp and circumstance? Where is the celebratory post with adornments galore? Where is the special episode commemorating this fabulous event?

I made it as far as creating commemorative art. For everything else, there's always the future. But the question remains: what can you do in ten years?

Thank you, whether you spoke spontaneously, edited endlessly, or listened listlessly. Thank you.

I am as surprised as you are that there is a bonus section this season.

Remember, we were talking about podcasts. One of the foundational pillars we relied on back then was the so-called "weekly tech news" format. For each episode of the premiere weekly podcast, At The Nexus, we would cover that week's tech news happenings. The format was quite popular and indeed an inspiration for my podcast.

Let's go on a detour. Maybe when you're going through a routine a little too stringently, you end up feeling like time is compressed instead of fleeting. Novelty is somewhere between commonplace and unique, and when you fall towards the unremarkable side of things, your sense of accomplishment and time skew. You may ask yourself,"well, how did I get here?"

Back then, everything was new, not just the act of podcasting but even the news itself. You are thinking, "well, by definition!" No, the tech news today and the news back then are substantially different. I refuse to praise the iPad or scream BlackBerry in this text. There's far less wonder now; the consumer tech industry has cooled, the pace of progress has slowed, and the same tried and tired tropes reign supreme.

A year into our 146 episode run of At The Nexus, I wondered: how much of this matters? Tech news is entirely ephemeral. Occasionally there are pivotal junctures, but the overwhelming majority of the content was a moment in the blink of an eye. What we said one day surged towards invalidation just weeks later.

OK, now I know that you think you will remember because of this experiment's priming effect. That could happen, but it could be an entire holiday, state, or even a year away! Quick, can you tell me precisely what you ate for snack time two weeks ago after lunch? I dare say it's impossible.

I use this "will it matter in two weeks" framing frequently. Most worries fall in the face of two weeks passing by, and most triumphs glow all that time. No, it's not that nothing matters. Sometimes it's just enough knowing that what mattered today is transitory, and it will come, and it will go, and soon it will be two weeks ago. You and everything else will move on. What mattered, you will remember, but much of the rest stretches away into the wheel of time.

There's something funny going on in this letter. See if you can spot it. I think I accidentally almost somehow slightly connected every single story section in this letter. Well, there's no way to confirm or deny; we just may never know. Is this the legendary connected tetralogy?

As always, you are my honored guest here. This letter's writing is no small effort, and your time reading this is no small feat either. I have to say thank you one more time. I hope it was an enjoyable read. I hope your year has been well and your next year even better.

If you are adventurous and fastened your awesome card featuring Roxy the dog somewhere decorative or festive, please snap a photo and share it with me.

Thank you, and have a good one.