In Review: 2022 • Brady Salz

And you, like Concorde
I came, a gentle hill racеr
I was breathless
Up on evеry mountain
Just to look for your light

Some Thoughts

2022 was the biggest singular step I could take in a new direction. It doesn't mean I moved a large distance, but it does mean things changed. In the larger picture, nothing appears to have changed: same apartment, same company, same interests. Summarizing it that way is like a lazy painting: three fat brush strokes and the job's done. To hell with that. Each hair on that brush bent a little further this year, splayed out wide. Maybe we had the same colors, but the output was completely new.

Goodbyes. Lots of people ducked out this past year. They didn't pass away, but they moved out of my current sphere either professionally or socially. It feels pretty dang unfair that as soon as the COVID iceberg melted folks moved on. I think that's being selfish though, as they were likely waiting for that moment for more than a minute. Some left because of me, some I told it was their last day. All that sucked, and it doesn't matter how many times you get told “and that's the hard part”, you still feel like you screwed it up.

Love. I attended four weddings, two bachelor parties, and most importantly, my younger brother got engaged. I ended my relationship at the start of the year. I've wrestled with this one a lot and truthfully, I'm still not sure how I feel. I actively separate my environments. This felt like tying a string around myself, loop after loop digging into me, compressing my spheres and begging me to explode. I made the right call for myself, but tragically I'd still describe it as the wrong place and time. Love is beautiful, love is ugly.

Throwbacks. The League of Legends World Championships were held in North America this year with the finals taking place in San Francisco. I haven't played the game since college (aside from a few one-offs at the start of the pandemic) but for some reason I was hooked on following it again. And hooked I was - I followed every game this year and it was an absolute delight. I used to be mildly ashamed of this hobby (watching video games? really dude?) but who cares, it was awesome. It got me to play a bit and the joy of winning really proves why this game is still going over a decade later.

Decades. 2022 is the most two-filled year I'll live to see. With it gone, so went my two's and began my third decade. I haven't given it much thought since turning 30. I (perhaps universally) spent much, much more time being concerned about turning 30 rather than being 30. Now that I'm here, I'm not sure.

Some Travel

It certainly wasn't planned this way, but it ended up being this way: I went a lot of places. I'm going to lump them into two categories, since I've struggled to think of any common theme uniting all of them. I did get insight out of all this - I really dig traveling spontaneously. So much of my day job is careful planning, extrapolation, forecasting, strategizing, etc, that I find the opposite incredibly appealing. Get on a plane, leave!

The issue with this strategy is that I never have the Step 0 -> Step 1 motivating factor. I hate planning things, so I don't plan to go anywhere. This is lame equilibrium to sit in, and I want to find a way to kickstart it better (more later).

By Design

I got invited and/or was told to go to a bunch of places.

Phoenix, AZ - a bachelor party is always a good time, but this one was a necessary time. Escape the social frost of the last two years and lie down in the heat of the sun. Between the Friday I landed to the Monday I left, my social body had so thoroughly thawed that it regained an entire degree of freedom.
Chicago, IL [x2] - Weddings galore! These nearly covered the entire spectrum of possibilities: from a gigantic Indian wedding filled to the brim with nearly a dozen rehearsed dance number to a small, family only gathering in the middle of a park, with the location decided at the last second. I got to dance, drum, and even deliver speeches to these parties.
Pismo Beach, CA - a beautiful wedding of beautiful people in a beautiful land. Nonetheless I felt slightly deceived: this was the group that introduced me to camping and the invite strongly welcomed tents, vans, and outdoor sleeping lovers of all types. Yet to my great (and their) surprise, I ended up being one of the few to actually sleep outside. Past me wouldn't believe it, current me is chuckling over the inverted expectations.
Cape Canaveral, FL - Despite working there for 5 years, I sometimes forget how real the thing I'm building is. Getting to see a real launch site and touch a real rocket reminded me. Adrenaline boosts, always welcome.
Massachusetts - An annual hometown trip. I don't dread it anymore, but still not leaderboard topping. Then I realized the ingredient to removing the worst parts: a rental car. It was the first time I've been in that state and felt like I had power. If I didn't want to be somewhere, I just left. Half a lifetime ago, I would've given an arm and a leg for that freedom. Oh, and a load of booze helped too.

By Happenstance

The best of them weren't really even planned, they just made themselves happen.

Thailand - sometimes you've just got to scram. Where are you going? What are you doing? When are you coming back? … Are you coming back? I'll tell you when I see you.
Lehi, UT - A friend is having a rough as hell day and vents to me about it. Actions speak louder than acknowledgements, so 15 minutes later I bought a ticket on a flight that left two hours later to accompany them here. Misery may love company, but paradoxically, the best cure is camaraderie.
Gainesville, FL - Yes well of course it was planned on paper, but my plans went out the window when company arrived and we're all the better for it.

Some Music

The best things going into my ear drums this past year. I was surprised that I made it out as much as I did - I thought this was a pretty quiet year, but I still ended up attending once a month on average.

Releases

Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road. One of the most mesmerizing albums I've had the fortune of listening to. The orchestration is dense yet sparse - each instrument stepping up to take a turn as the main voice and turning itself back just as abruptly. The rhythms heave and ho on every song, effortlessly swinging between the quietest waltz and to the brashest dance line. Chaos Space Machine is a master class in how to play a kit - the simple fill at 2:23 from bridge to outro is the windup to a triumphant fist punch put into percussive form. The lyrics are some of the saddest I've ever read, and they double down when sung. However, the most beautiful idea about this album is that it's a record of a time in history. Right before the album was released, the main singer of the band stepped down. In an equally impressive and bizarre move, BC,NR has continued touring but only playing new music. So if you want to know how people felt at that time, this is all there is. Such an amazing notion. I urge you to listen to the album twice: once lying down at overpowering volumes, then once while outside, sprinting and pausing as the tempo demands.
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You by Big Thief. I'll be the first to admit, I kind of fell out of interest with this band for their last few albums. But this one grabbed me. My highlight? Without a doubt, it's Time Escaping due to the wild soundscape. It feels like listening to a 3D movie, trying to capture each note that bounces and echoes around.
Pool Kids by Pool Kids. There's plenty of talk on “growing up” in art. Usually it means tackling “more mature” themes or “less is more” or a certain je ne sais quoi yadda yadda. I'm going to skip all that and instead say Pool Kids leveled up. The music they're making now is just on another level in terms of pure skill, both individually as musicians and combined.
The Long Way, The Slow Way by Camp Trash (who is a real band, and I'm in it). No one track beats out their single (Bobby is still #1) but it's a fantastic album that was well worth the wait and the non-stop Twitter memes. This soundtracked the majority of my random wanders through Thailand, keeping one foot in front of the other in strange places.
Farm to Table by Bartees Strange. Do you like hip hop, rap, emo, R&B, punk, pop? Have you ever tried them all at once? If not, I promise you, this album throws them into the grinder and you'll love what comes out the other side.
SUPER CHAMPON by Otoboke Beaver. Sometimes you just need to shred, and this album shreds. Check out Pardon? for a perfect example of just how great rock and roll is.

Concerts

The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky, performed by San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen. I listened to the finale hundreds of times of times in high school. I burned my eyeballs out squinting into an iPod Classic/Video watching downloaded Phantom Regiment clips. I nearly exploded on the spot when I realized that we would get to to play (a watered down version) of this piece during a marching band trip to Disney World. But my absolute favorite version was with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Every bad night in high school, I would bounce back by imaging myself conducting that grand orchestra and drowning in their sound, silencing everything else going on. I still instinctively straighten my back and hold my hands wide, eager to queue in beat one.

That was my favorite, until now. I saw a bus stop poster showing Salonen was with the SF Orchestra and my brain did a triple take when I saw the lineup. Seeing it live after all this time took absolutely nothing away. My fist clenched on every seventh beat, perfectly in line with the timpani and the bass drum. I cheered and screamed louder than was appropriate for the venue, but decorum be damned, it's The Firebird.

THE FEST 20. I go to a lot of events solo dolo, but not this one. I was thrilled and secretly confused as to why a pair of great friends would travel across the country on my recommendation, but that they did. So many great moments:

Seeing Nectar play FEST. I got to play in a “band lottery” with Kamila in college and she blew me away musically, I'm thrilled to see her keep performing.
Teaching my friends how to skank
Crowd surfing at The Dopamines
Tearing the dance floor up with newly-found SF locals Gloomy June
Watching the crowd erupt over frog spit and Algernon Cadwallader
Barely being able to walk home by the end of it
Every single PBR group photo. All 30+ of them.

DCI West. It had been 3-4 years since I'd seen some real live summer band and this was a much needed refresher on that. Exactly as I remembered =)
Just Friends. A band I've been desperately trying to see for a few years but keep sneaking out of my calendar. It was destined to happen yet AGAIN due to a bachelor party overlapping with the weekend I had planned to see them. But I got clever - turns out Phoenix AZ is pretty close to the Bay Area, so all I had to do was extend my trip one more day and voila, the tour caught up to me. It was a lonely Monday night show up until it wasn't. The venue was split in half so it could be all-ages with a bar, ID re-checked in the middle. The bar was pretty but not completely empty - the ideal density to make some new friends. We rocked all night and I can't wait to go back to Phoenix.

Misc

Notes on a few other things that stuck out to me:

Belinda Says by Alvvays. I'm happy to bandwagon on this on. I hadn't really listened to this album until it placed super highly on other end of year lists. I gave it a spin and this one had entire face pinched - the outro might be the best of the year. Nailing the high note and immediately fading out for a guitar solo should have you screaming YES! YES! FUCK YES! from the rafters
Pressure Cooker by Dazy & Militarie Gun was an earworm for quite a few months. I ultimately didn't go for the albums as much as the song, but don't let that take away from this single.
The Mighty Mighty Bosstones broke up. I'm incredibly bummed I never dragged myself one of their Hometown Throwdown's but that's on me. Someday I Suppose was the first step into my decade of emo and punk. Thank you for your years of wild performances and constant energy
Meat Loaf passed away. While not often found in my queue, Everything Louder Than Everything Else is half of my core values. Rest in peace.
I got absolutely obsessed with Chumbawamba for a month. They are not just the one-hit wonder for Tubthumping, they have an deep, wild past that goes all over the place. My favorite find was Timebomb - diamonds are in the places you never expect.

Some Reviews

Do I not do this? I'm not sure, I didn't do it last time. Maybe I didn't do it due to the situation around those last couple years. A question for a younger us that'll never be answered. I struggled with the right word for this section: results? Nah, too binary pass-or-fail. Grades? Too academic. Critique? Too formal. Reviews sounds a little too boring but doesn't give any implication or scale, so let's go with it.

I Want To Build A Factory

Fuck yeah. This really happened. It's not perfect, and there's plenty more work to do, but it happened. Despite doing my job and shilling that “this is going to happen” for 6 months straight, I was secretly panicking internally. How the hell are we going to figure this out and make it happen? I'm not sure, but we did! Every year this job changes in ways I could not expect, and this year it happened again. Things I learned the criticality of:

Have a bill of materials, a real one
Minimize quantity of procedures + processes but maximize their quality
Demo it before you do it
Hiring great technicians
Safety, Quality, Rate
Get metrics immediately, but never add targets So much of this was was aided by this book: Product Realization by Anna Thornton. Highly, highly recommend.

I Want To Prove I Still Have It

I struggle with the title of this one compared to the text of it. By title, I absolutely still have it. The last two paragraphs prove that: I built shit. But that's not what the body of the previous one was asking for: I wanted to see myself flex my EE skills and tape-out. In that sense, I guess The Monkey's Paw curled and I got that wish. I submitted a design to TinyTapeout so we should be good right?

Not quite. Instead of me showing all of my core rad EE skills, especially with a fresh upgrade of Linux/Programming skills from work, I did the exact opposite. I slowly drag-and-dropped basic little logic gates in a web GUI, even more simplistic than the work I did my sophomore year. Whatever! I love that EE skillset, and I admit it is probably deteriorating a bit, but I'm fine with it. My career is going really cool places and I'm thrilled to be on this ride.

I Want To Feel Comfortable

This one is hilarious in retrospect, but was incredibly frustrating at the time. Just as I start climbing out that hole, the stock market peaked. This probably sounds like hyperbole but I assure you, it isn't. I tried getting into investing around 2021 Q4. The first half of 2022 was making me tear my hair out: why, why, this is so unfair!! But many beers and many days later, I just kind of stopped caring. I hadn't carefully followed Bloomberg, CNBC, or any other stock markets for the last 30 years because they were boring and spoiler alert: they are still boring. My interest is now just adding a new row for Investing in my budgeting app and autofilling it on the 1st of every month.

So… mission accomplished? I don't have a reason to care, so I don't refresh all the apps all the time, so it's all good? Just like that? It's an unsatisfying conclusion but a welcome one nonetheless.

Some Resolutions

What's next, what's upcoming, and what's behind door #3?

I Want To Kickstart Myself

Echoing what I said in the travel section, I have such a hard time getting myself started on something. Once I'm in it, it's easy to go with the adventure (or, if none is present, create some). How can I magically will that spark into existence? Nothing huge though - I'm not mandating I do massive cross-world trip every month. But now that I know how easy and painless the small trips are, I should do more of them! There are a few “classic California” trips I have yet to do in my 5 years here, and that's embarrassing. I have ideas (clothes/toiletries go bag? pre-booked car rental/flight? ~~bucket~~ mild interest list and a random() function? ready-made itineraries a la recipes?) but let's see how they work out.

I Want To Grow With Help

The most effective way to learn is with a direct aide, 1:1. I'm a deep believer in that, only furthered by having been on the other side of the table. I've always loved teaching and tutoring and (hopefully) was pretty effective at it when I was paid to do so in graduate school. I've taken a few MOOC courses in computer science, engineering, and manufacturing and while I've loved them, they're not as useful as the direct mentorship you get live.

I'm leaning music lessons, especially drum ones. I loved the patterns we learned and got to play in the Latin steel band ensembles. But if not that, maybe a language? I have a professional desire to learn Vietnamese: three of my employees speak it as their primary language. They put with so much bizarre language from me that I have to try and meet them halfway.

I Want To Build A Waterfall

Too many resolutions are abstracting, never ending goals. Not this one - it's as blunt as they come.

I want to build a George Rhoads-esque waterfall. There's something so pleasant about the way water moves around. Rivers, streams, current and falls, all of them swell in chorus. Randomness, lighting, music, all the whistles and bells. Let's build it.

Some Pictures

No rhyme, no reason, just favorites.