2022, a retrospective.

Best start to thirties I could ask for.

Career

10 years ago, I spent day and night working on a startup to create a community for like-minded people. It feels like I came to a full-circle this year, as I led design and strategy for Communities 2.0 project at Discord. We worked on a suite of initiatives to make communities on Discord easier to onboard, understand, and make connections with other like-minded people.

In particular, we launched:

• Forum Channels: creating a new channel type where people can have real-time conversations within topic-based posts (like forums, hence the name!)
• New Member Onboarding: streamlining the community join process with a set of customization questions to get channels and roles.
• Opt-in Channel List: letting users customize what channels they want to see — no more dozens of channels you’ll never see in the sidebar!

This was truly a herculean team effort, spending days debating on tiniest decisions and pixel-pushing each detail. I’m also thankful to have met my new manager this year, who’s probably one the best mentor I’ve had in my career. A good manager must both give constructive crits to push their reports to grow, and support their reports with empathy. As easy as it sounds, this is hard to find — often you’ll find people skew one way or another. I’m fortunate to have met someone who strikes a delicate balance between these, constantly supporting me to push myself to grow.

All in all, this year was genuinely one of the most fun year I’ve had in my career and really excited to continue building the best communities experience on Discord — our work has just started!

Life

We’re married! I’m so grateful to open a new stage in our lives with the best partner and soulmate I could ask for, and to have gained a new family 6,000 miles away from the motherland. Planning the wedding was no doubt stressful, from choosing the vendors and venue to going through a laundry list of tasks. I also added extra work for us as I wanted to design each little details of our wedding, like the digital invitations, food menu, and seating chart, to create a one-of-a-kind, special day for us.

In retrospective, all the hard work was all worth it for the wedding day — which was nothing short of magical. The biggest highlight of the wedding was no doubt walking down the aisle as husband and wife, seeing all our friends from each stage of our lives coming together in one place to commemorate the biggest day of our lives.

Here are some of the other highlights of the year:

• Honeymoon in Bora Bora, which was truly paradise on earth.
• Bachelor trip in Spain with the boys.
• Got to see Faker for Worlds 2022 finals, but devastated by the loss :(
• First time trip to Korea with my wife.
• Got to spend a month living in Alaska!

Looking forward to 2023

When I was 20, I was always hungry: constantly pushing myself, learning & trying new things, and chasing my dreams day and night. Looking back today, I actually don’t think I’ve been really pushing myself the past few years. Whether it’s burn out, busy with all the changes in life and work, or just finding myself to be in a more comfortable stage in life, I think it’s all excuses and I could’ve spent my time and energy more wisely.

Next year, I want to go back to staying hungry and keep challenging myself:

• Keep making killer stuff, whether it’s Discord, starting a new side project, or finally finishing the new portfolio.
• Learn new skills, like mastering Origami, or keeping up to date with the latest in web development.
• Explore new ideas and think about where I can use my design and creativity the best.

I share my new year resolutions at the end of the year to keep myself accountable, so if you’ve read this, please check in on me from time to time to see how I’m doing. I feel like I had a great start to my thirties this year, and I’ll try my best to take it even better by constantly pushing myself.

Here’s to even better 2023 :)