2023 Year in Review

2023 was a year packed with experiences. I’m writing this down before the memories fade.

First Half

Mybridge

Mybridge filled my entire first half and much of my second half of the year.

Mybridge is the Japanese version of Remember, a business card management service operating in Japan.

As I entered my second year at Remember, a new organization called the New Business Crew was formed at the start of 2023, and work began on monetizing Mybridge — which had been running as a free service in Japan — with a target launch in early June.

At the time, the local team in Japan had also been expanded and staffed up, and I was excited about the opportunity to work on a global service. Later, I even got to visit the Shinjuku office, which was a really memorable experience.

The backbone of the service was similar to Remember, but it had diverged in various ways through localization. Because of that, inserting a monetization layer required structurally reworking many parts of the codebase.

Since we had to overhaul the entire architecture while adding monetization features, fixing one area would frequently break another. The existing project was written in JavaScript, which made it hard to reason about things quickly, and there were too many dark corners in the code hiding latent issues. I don’t think these problems are inherent to JS itself, but it made me appreciate TypeScript all the more. So we migrated to TypeScript along the way, pushing hard toward the June deadline.

I don’t think I had ever worked this intensely in my two years there.

At the same time, even though I was physically exhausted, the work never felt boring or miserable. (Probably helped that I was working out consistently at the time.) Looking back, I think it was because everyone on the Crew was a great person, and I genuinely enjoyed working with them.

It was also my first time tackling such a large-scale project on my own, and this was when I finally experienced the heavy workload I had hoped for when joining Remember. I think I pushed myself even harder because of a thirst for growth — the belief that enduring that level of workload would lead to significant improvement.

So did I actually grow that much?

Growth (WIP)

During the four months of Mybridge monetization work, I wrote 200,000 lines of code and removed 200,000 lines. (I’m not sure if that’s a lot or not.)

I still don’t know what metrics I should use to determine whether I’ve grown. This question continued to linger into the second half of the year.

Second Half

A company isn’t exactly a space for self-actualization, but I feel that my current organization does fulfill that to some extent, and that there are people here who share a similar direction and sensibility. (Not everyone may feel the same, but at least that’s how I see it.)

If the first half was about doing work I wanted to do, the second half was about facing work I needed to do. After finishing the Mybridge monetization, I spent a couple more months on additional Mybridge tasks, then worked on security audit preparation through the end of the year.

“Work that needs to be done.” (To be fair, everything you do at a company is work that needs to be done.)

It might sound like a dull phrase, but that’s not the nuance I intended.

Around that time, our team read a book together called ‘Growing Together,’ and it gave me a chance to think about what mindset to bring when facing different types of work.

Hiring

I had been participating in interviews here and there before, but midway through the second half, I took over the hiring process from a teammate who had been managing it. I kept having doubts. Am I the right person to handle hiring? Someone has to do it, but should I be the one stepping up? Since we didn’t have a team lead at the time, if we had one, I wouldn’t have even been in a position to worry about this — so I saw it as an opportunity that might not come again. Deep down, I also wanted some fresh stimulation, and I hoped that running the hiring process would help me find metrics for my own growth.

So I volunteered and took on the hiring process as well. (Starting October 2023)

I didn’t keep an exact count, but I probably interviewed around 10 to 15 candidates. I had never considered myself a particularly eloquent speaker, so preparing interview questions and conducting interviews wasn’t easy.

Still, after doing it several times, I got much more comfortable. And through conducting interviews, I was able to identify areas where I could grow further.

Reviewing a wide range of resumes and interviewing diverse candidates — it was a period where I gathered many questions I needed to ask myself.