📚 A 2024 dispatch

In classic Steinborn fashion, I forgot about my 2023 dispatch until August 2024(!), and it wasn’t necessarily a sufficient explanation of what had actually gone on. So it’s time for me to digest all of 2024, and also try to be way more detailed about what went on, but I wound up starting on this post on New Years’ Eve. Why is that, you might ask?

Logistical. I simply hadn’t made it a priority then. I didn’t even know people read this blog until relatively recently. For the longest time, it felt like I was simply shouting into the void.

Now I get to dive into 2024, and let’s just say… it was a decidedly mixed bag for me. A lot of unambigously good things happened, but there were also quite a few low points that dragged me down. But let’s waste no more time.

Sorrow

This year has been marked by one rather consistent theme: sorrow. With no way to control what’s going on.

The year began with me losing two family members: my grandmother died on January 30th, 2024, and my mother died on February 11th, 2024. Just now, into New Years Eve when I wrote this, I looked at the photos I took at the funeral: cold, embalmed, what once was is now no more. Thus, my first two trips of the year entailed me flying (at the last minute) from NYC to Atlanta to attend first my grandmother’s and my mother’s funerals.

My grandmother’s fate was explicitly chosen by her. Her kidneys had failed, and instead of dialysis, she chose to let nature take its course. I don’t blame her for taking that course—having approached beyond 80, a thoroughly empty nest, and a progressive decline in her ability to do things, I wasn’t shocked to see her take this path.

My mother, on the other hand, had been in very poor health for years. There were many health scares, some sending her to the hospital. The episode that would finally claim her life started in late October 2023. She wound up at Grady for several months before being released to a rehabilitation facility, where she seemed to improve before her heart gave out through cardiac arrest. I still remember how much time I had with her: five minutes at the rehab facility, before they needed to do something with her and I had to go back to the airport (conveniently, this facility was located just south of Hartsfield-Jackson).

After my mother died, this left me in a pickle: my brothers relied on her Social Security disability, while I was trying to live my own life in New York. This caused some tension. The good news is that my younger brother did finally manage to find a job and keep it down, so I’m not as worried about them any more, and they’re no longer having to rely on me to support their day-to-day needs, but there were a lot of very uncomfortable conversations with them and other family members in the wake of it all, and that’s something I wish not to repeat ever again.

All of this has been painful. It’s part of the reason why I simply haven’t worked on very many personal projects. (That said, I did manage to redo this website using UnoCSS and learned an entirely new way of CSS, so there is that.)

Writing

Sometimes I consider myself a storyteller who just happens to be a software engineer.

It was late in the year when I first started being serious about writing again. Prior to this, I had written a poem about grieving, before I gave my website a six month hiatus due to other events that were going on at the time (primarily work-related). As a result, my site hasn’t taken off (on the orange site or anywhere else, in fact).

I started being much more serious about writing starting in August. In fact, my most prolific topic was the two website redesigns I did, one in August (a fairly minor one, mostly adding dark mode to an HTML5 UP template) and one in October (basically a total redesign). The latter is not my best work, as I documented it quickly after doing the redesign and GitHub Copilot filled in some of the text with some rather awkward language. (Pro-tip: code completion LLMs produce rather boring English sentences. Prefer using a fully-fledged chatbot instead. I’ve been mostly using Claude.)

I also wrote my second longform technical article, The Velocity Chronicles: Part 0, discussing quite a bit of my background in the Minecraft scene, and the motivation behind me starting the Velocity project in the first place. I’ve gotten some positive feedback on it, and I hope to get Part 1 out in the new year, primarily covering events that happened in late 2018 and 2019.

I also started work on two pieces of fiction in earnest: a novel and a short story called “Precipices.” I started on the novel in September and while I’ve made substantial progress, it’s not at a point where I’d be happy with publishing the work. “Precipices”, which I started on over the holiday break, is much closer to complete (it will probably be out in January 2025).

Overall, a much more successful year in terms of writing things! I hope to continue doing more writing with a mix of fiction and technical writing, in the hopes of establishing a bigger “brand” for myself. I’m obviously not looking to be some sort of “thought leader” or the like, I just want to keep my brain active. I’m also hoping to write my 2025 dispatch as the year goes on instead of doing it all at one big spurt at the end of the year, just to reduce the cognitive load on myself.

I do also feel as if my focus on writing at work has also greatly contributed to sharpening my writing skills overall. That said, if I had two things to focus on, it would be “sharpening my creative writing skills” and “actually remembering to write things.”

Ramp, Ramp, Ramp!

First, let’s talk about the good parts: 2024 was actually a banner year for me at Ramp! That year saw a few major accomplishments, which I hope to blog about either on the Ramp engineering blog or here (if they’re not particularly Ramp-specific).

So far, Ramp has been the longest gig I’ve ever worked, and that’s including the Minecraft server space (the longest was previously my time at Mineteria/Voldex? That was March 2018 to January 2021, so close to three years). Having this level of stability and longevity is previously unexplored territory for me. It has also been, arguably, the most interesting and impactful gig I’ve ever had, albeit less exciting in some ways (only in Minecraft would you be gutsy enough to write your own proxy at small scale and get away with it).

I joined Ramp in November 2021, at what I consider to be the “Goldilocks zone”: early enough to continue to see the company scale, and yet late enough that almost all the risk was removed. (I also lucked out in joining at a time when the job market was unusually good for software engineers.) Ever since that point, Ramp has progressed from being a small, ~200 person startup, to having over 1,000 employees and penetrating the enterprise market. With this move upscale comes significant new challenges that we’ll have to solve, and a lot of my work in 2024 was principally to prepare our issuing platform for this next stage of growth. We took a long, hard look at the issuing platform that got us to a $7.65 billion valuation at the time, and considered it unfit for purpose as we continued to scale. The responsibility for making it scale for future growth has largely fallen upon me. No pressure!

Our team changed a lot over the year. Some of the new folks we hired were people I mentored was responsible for mentoring (yes, we’re hiring… come work with me!)

I also got to work on some interesting side quests. I’m hoping to write about those in the future (whether here or on the Ramp engineering blog), but a lot of those have the end effect of making the Ramp platform more reliable, important as we begin to be depended upon by larger customers.

The personal tragedy of 2024 did spill over into my work. There were times where I almost wanted to give up. One such point came in early April, where I almost sought to leave my present team, but after carefully thinking it over and discussing it, cooler heads prevailed and I decided to stay and continue down my current path. It’s been quite successful, all things considered.

So, what does 2025 have in store for me? Ramp has only captured a very small fraction of the TAM of U.S. corporate spending, and an even lower percentage of global corporate spending. My job now is to keep the momentum going! That means evolving our issuing platform, helping build up a world-class financial technology primitives team providing leverage to the rest of Ramp, and supporting our move towards new markets for Ramp. It’s going to be an exciting time to be at Ramp!

Travel

I only made two major trips in 2024, aside from funerals and a emergency trip related to estate matters. The first trip was to Miami, to work out of the Ramp office there for a week, and the second trip took me to a place I’d never been before: Washington, D.C. Both trips were prompted by the above family deaths, the former being a welcome change of scenry, the latter being a much-needed break from work and the family situation I wound up in.

Looking ahead to 2025, I’m planning to keep my travel schedule light. While my trips to Miami and DC had their bright spots, 2024 reminded me just how draining travel can be – especially the multiple last minute flights to Atlanta for funerals, which took both an emotional and financial toll. The upside? Amtrak is very good and can make things less painful, at least if your destination is on the Northeast Corridor. Between those difficult journeys and the general hassles of travel (choosing transportation, booking hotels, navigating airports, and planning itineraries), I’ve appreciated staying put. There’s so much of New York I haven’t seen yet!

Miami

I was in Miami in late March for a work trip, which I got permission to take in the aftermath of my mother dying. Because this was for work, I wasn’t able to spend too much time doing other things, but I did at least visit the Wynwood Walls and the Museum of Graffiti, along with going to a gun range (which brought out a decidedly different side of me, closer to my origins than before).

That said, there was a significant work-related milestone accomplished while I was here in the course of reworking our issuing platform…

Washington, D.C.

I decided to go on this trip in April 2024 for Memorial Day week. I needed this: my last “break” was in late October 2023 and I stayed in the city after a particularly rough on-call cycle and “quality cycle” that sapped me. I had never been to D.C. before, not even for school, but surprisingly, there were a lot of connections that Ramp and even my team had to the D.C. area! It was where my aunt went to school, and I also knew someone from the Minecraft scene that lived in the area.

Arrival was smooth thanks to taking the Amtrak Northeast Regional train from New York Penn Station, which drops you off at Union Station, not far from the Capitol and with convenient access to the Red Line of the Washington Metro. You can bet I enjoyed riding on perhaps America’s greatest Great Society metro system…

I got to see the obligatory things: the Capitol complex, the White House, various random government buildings, museums on the National Mall, the Metro, Arlington National Cemetery, Old Town Alexandria, and more.

Perhaps most interesting of all, I spent time in the chaos known as Tysons and the area around the Dulles Access Road (accessed via the Silver Line, of course) to meet up with an old buddy of mine from the Mineteria days. Tysons is a real mess of a place: highways, wide stroads and other auto-centric land uses, office towers, shopping malls, and even Washington Metro stations sprouting in a place that was once largely forest and farmland. On the particular Friday I went there, it was a well-appointed ghost town. But hey, now I can say I’ve been there!

The trip, unfortunately, did end with me contracting COVID-19. Totally worth it, though!

Here’s a few photos from that trip.

Prediabetes, eating disorders, and weight loss

First, a bit of context, since I haven’t talked about this before.

I’d always been on the larger side. My parents would say my stomach was like a black hole since I would go back for seconds or even thirds. I hadn’t known that I was actually planting the seeds of larger health problems down the line. That said, when I moved up to New York, the fact I was walking around everywhere caused me to begin losing at least some weight and be more fit.

In 2022, I went for my first check-up in a long time, and it was determined that I had prediabetes. In late 2023, I was prescribed semaglutide (specifically Wegovy), the blockbuster anti-obesity medication that costs a lot of money and is very popular in America for obvious reasons. (In fact, the U.S. obesity rate has stabilized and is likely to decline thanks to these medications). I had difficulty sourcing the medication in 2023, so I only started benefitting from it in 2024. In the meantime, I was prescribed metformin to help with blood sugar control.

I think the results really do speak for themselves:

• I am less likely to act on food-related urges, being better able to control them.
• I lost a lot of weight, going from 320 pounds at the end of 2023 to 250 pounds at the end of 2024, due to a combination of exercise, eating less food, and improving my diet. People in real life have noticed the significant weight loss.
• Hemoglobin A1c, an average of blood sugar levels in the body, went from being in the prediabetes range (peaking at 5.9% in September 2023) to being in the non-diabetic range (5.6% in December 2024). My prediabetes is now well-managed by medication.
• My blood pressure has also gone down.

I feel like a completely different person now, and I am hoping to build upon this progress in 2025. However, it has been hard to derive all the benefits due to all the other things that erupted in my personal life.

Finally, a callout to an old colleague…

Pablo Meier was also late in writing his 2023 in review post, but there is one memorable photo from it:

The offer to cross the Brooklyn Bridge (or any bridge of your choice) is still valid! 😀