What you can do in a decade

a retrospective on turning 40

I turned 40 today. For my 35th I did principles, but for my 40th, I wanted to offer perhaps more useful reflections.

Bill Gates is credited with saying that ‘Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.’ I have just completed what many consider to be a good ten years. If you are me 10 years ago, you might like the perspective it brings.

10 years ago (April 2016):

• My hedge fund career (which I had spent ~a decade working towards since high school) had abruptly ended with my boss suddenly leaving us
• I couldn’t code much other than writing pandas in Jupyter Notebooks, and my 2 years of Haskell for options pricing
• I had no blog (i would start a Medium shortly after). I did not have an active Twitter account, primarily lurking in Facebook/Tickld and then Reddit
• I had just ended a short situationship (shoutout Kenny) and basically had no chance of dating anyone for the next 8 years
• I had ~no friends in San Francisco; when I moved to New York I just had work friends, and briefly, acapella friends, but otherwise mostly kept to myself in Chelsea/Flatiron. My biggest social event of the year was a cageless tiger shark dive trip to Fiji with Jane, my JC friend (who has since settled down, boo!)

Now:

• I’ve made my own career and the careers of many others in AI Engineering
• I can code JS/Python very slowly but know enough to prompt most things
• I have Latent Space and Dx.tips and swyx.io and Twitter
• I have Mada and 2 dogs and many good friends in my life (even doing a Broadway song for the first time in 18 years!)

It’s not been a perfect ten years: I failed to join an AI lab early despite strong opportunities in 2022 and 2023, I did not proceed further in deep learning despite starting in 2019, my fitness has steadily declined with my metabolism, friends/mentors have passed on, I’ve parted ways with friends and partners I would very very much rather not have lost, Smol ended up getting folded into Cognition rather than finding a direction I had conviction in, and (for whatever it is worth) I still do not have kids and spent less time with family than I ideally would want.

But overall I think my 30’s went much better than my 20’s. For what it’s worth, most people in their 40’s seem to report feeling that way looking back. I think having to reinvent myself every 2-5 years (variously, I’ve been a central banker, an options trader, an equities analyst, a fintech guy, a frontend guy, a data engineering guy, a devrel guy, a platform engineering guy, and now whatever the fuck it is i do) has kept neuroplasticity strong, but also come at the cost of being able to work for anyone or, increasingly, accept visions different than my own that does not make sense to me as evidently superior (this is hopefully and subtly different than arrogance in rejecting everyone else’s POV).

Maybe this is stronger in Asian traditions, but when I was younger, I was much more willing to accept what society/superiors told me was my path, what I should do, what “good performance” meant. But then I realized the world is run by people no smarter than you — and even people that genuinely mean well, end up only prescribing games that you don’t want to win. The only lasting path to satisfaction, happiness, skin in the game, maximizing learning, is to really study everybody’s game, define your own, and then play it to the best of your ability.

The simple name for this is self-belief - that you can ACTUALLY, truly, bet on things and opportunities and people and companies and whatever you genuinely believe to be true and necessary, despite the cynicism and ambivalence of others, and to exert persistent and unyielding intentional effort over time to make real what you know needs to exist in the world.

https://x.com/thedankoe/status/2045517520690725184?s=20

After all, everything else Good in the world was made by someone else who went through the exact same messy journey.

In one year you’ll probably mostly be thinking and doing what you think you’ll be doing in a year today.

In a decade, EVERYTHING can change. Especially in this coming, probably most critical decade of humanity.

I’m excited to see you in 2036. Hang in there and be good to others and to yourself.

Misc

This was 30.

Then came my 30’s:

• 2016: Moving to New York for Sentieo/Alphasense as a nontechnical PM (creating the Similar Tables feature — I quit before the patent was granted) and slowly realizing I couldn’t do shit without convincing engineers to do it for me
• 2017: spent the new year alone in a shitty motel in New Delhi (for work) wondering what I was doing with my life. decided to properly learn to code via FreeCodeCamp (raw, writeup, podcast) - this included a 2 month sabbatical in Chiang Mai I’ve basically never written about before where I basically binged FreeCodeCamp and Wes Bos tutorials every single day morning to midnight while listening to SEDaily and Syntax.fm, only to conclude that it wasn’t enough and then have to apply and join a bootcamp (Full Stack Academy). Then the job search and eventually getting my first (bad) job as a professional software engineer.
• 2018: The year I “went public”. Dev.to’s sponsorship of DevFestNYC pushed me to write my first technical blogposts ever. React Suspense happened and that got me noticed by Dan Abramov (who made me moderator of /r/reactjs), quickly followed by Learn In Public and my first ever conference talk at React Rally and getting hired for what became my first Developer Advocate role. I also started my Georgia Tech online Masters in CS program and started pushing TypeScript probably too hard.
• 2019: started my first ML course at Georgia Tech, did my second conference talk in Hawaii and third in Barcelona, laying the groundwork for me to eventually drop React for Svelte, developing The Hooks Talk with Dan that became my most famous talk, done in Singapore. I read and evangelized Boris Cherny’s Programming TypeScript, before he went on to create Claude Code, and did a bunch more Netlify work. Somewhere here I crossed 10,000 Twitter followers. I wrote In Defense of Hammers, which even in 2026 Will King remembers fondly.
• 2020: Covid year 1. Started Svelte Society (for the next 10xing downloads), left Netlify, and joined AWS after JAMstack died, started learning Tailwind and DynamoDB, wrote The Coding Career Handbook and The Third Age of JavaScript and How to Create Luck.
• 2021: halfway point. Joined Temporal as first Head of DX, wrote famous posts on DevRel and Usage Based Billing and the Self Provisioning Runtime and my Cloudflare bull thesis,
• 2022: Temporal Series B, and writing The End of Localhost and gave my first Data + AI talk and organized the very first Dev Writers Retreat in Miami, and started Latent Space.
• 2023: Latent Space started to take off, and eventually led me to move to SF, start smol.ai (with visa), start the podcast (retro), and write probably the most important blogpost of my career. Year ends with the first ever AI Engineer Summit.
• 2024: wrote my first fiction story in a decade, and ran the first AI Engineer World’s Fair while locked out of the country. Latent Space crosses 2M combined views/downloads.
• 2025: after yet another failed situationship, decided to write a Date Me doc on Jan 1 which indirectly led to Mada, and we end up moving in together. I also decided to join Cognition and remain an advisor today. AIE steps up to 4 events: an NYC summit, SF World’s Fair, AIE Paris (partnered with Koyeb), then AIE CODE back in NYC again. 10M views, 1.2M uniques.
• 2026: we have just completed the first AIE Europe 2026 in London and I’m writing this at the first AIE Miami 2026 partnered with React Miami.