Given the impending new year, I find myself reflecting on what captured my attention in 2022. Attention is limited and should be allocated to things that matter.

Health

This seemed to draw a lot of my attention this year. My growing interest was kickstarted by the content of a Sports Nutrition class I took in Fall 2021. (notes coming soon)

Fitness

This year I maintained a 260 day move streak on my Apple Watch - my longest ever. I performed significantly more difficult workouts this year than in years past. I’ve resumed leg day after a very long hiatus, began practicing yoga, and started using the sauna daily.

I also learned about, and subsequently began, DEXA scans for measuring body composition. A DEXA scan is a low energy X-ray of your entire body. It primarily measures bone density, but also provides your lean tissue mass and fat tissue mass. This allows you to quantify muscle mass changes over time, as well as any disparities between your left and right sides.

Below is workout data collected by my Apple Watch. Averages are provided by the Health app and totals are provided by the Fitness Totals app.

Activity Daily average Yearly total
Walking (miles) 6.5 2393
Exercise (minutes) 113 41220
Flights of stairs 11 4056
Steps 13514 4.9M
Active Calories 1033 375.3K

Nutrition

My primary nutrition goals this year were to reduce my sugar intake, increase muscle mass, and reduce body fat. The best thing I could do to hit all three was to start keeping a food log. I previously kept a food log while in college to measure total calories, protein, carbs, and fat. That allowed me to gauge my protein intake and maintain a certain macronutrient split. This time around, I additionally tracked saturated fat, sugar, fiber, and sodium. Tracking fiber allowed me to subtract it from the carb total due to being indigestible, while tracking saturated fat allowed me to focus on reducing the types of fats that actually matter.

To achieve my goal of reducing body fat via nutrition, I had three highest-impact levers. First, I could reduce the total amount of carbs I was ingesting. After all, I didn’t really need bread with every meal. Second, I could slow the digestion of my carbs. That would increase the amount that would get used as energy and thus reduce the amount that would get stored as body fat. Lastly, I could time the ingestion of my carbs better such that it coincided with the immediately recovery from a hard workout. That would maximize the amount of carbs used to restore muscle glycogen and aid in muscle recovery/growth, thus also reducing the amount stored as body fat.

My food log has helped me make better food choices. I’ve been able to reduce my body fat by 3.5% over the year. That has primarily come from using the second and third levers above. I’m still working on reducing the total carb intake.

Tech note: I’ve built this food log entirely in Notion using databases and templates.

Doppler

Doppler was by far my biggest focus in 2022. We raised a round of funding, more than doubled our head count, and shipped some amazing product. Some of my focus areas were growing Engineering’s output bandwidth, standing up a security team that’s more scalable than just me, and maximizing my impact as a co-founder (especially around company culture).

I took 19 days off from work. It’s more than Doppler’s 15 day minimum, but still probably not enough.

Continued Learning

When the pandemic began, I started taking Stanford Continuing Studies courses. These are online courses over Zoom that occur ~3 hours/week over 6-8 weeks. Courses are available for X, Y, Z, and a variety of other topics.

This year I took:

  • (COM 44) Effective Interpersonal Communication
  • (SCI 44) New Year New Metabolism
  • (PSY 96) Managing Emotions with Skill (CBT)
  • (BIO 07) Longing for Longevity: From Biology to Biohacking

My excitement at the start of the year led me to double up on classes in the Spring semester. This was unwise. It turns out I can only allocate enough time to do one class well right now (see Doppler above).

I also realized that no matter how interesting the information is during class, I only retain it by reviewing my notes several times afterward. The pitfalls of a late 20s brain.

Personal Projects

  • Authenticate to internal services via mTLS. I previously authenticated using basic auth.
  • Configuration profiles for my iOS and macOS devices. Removing the manual setup of core system services.
    • WiFi: Auto provision my WiFi network’s credentials on my devices. This involves per-device client certificates authenticated via WPA3-Enterprise.
    • Client certificate: provision the device’s mTLS creds for accessing internal services.
    • iOS VPN on Demand: Auto-initiate a VPN connection when attempting to access any of my internal networks from the public internet.
  • Enable encryption on my NAS
    • This required copying all data onto temp storage, multi-pass wiping all HDDs, creating a new encrypted Data pool, and then copying all data back.
  • Consolidate all crypto onto hardware wallet
    • With crypto exchanges going belly up, I’m not leaving any crypto hanging around.

Security

  • Move all SSH keys to macOS Keychain protected by biometrics
    • I also maintain an encrypted offline backup of all keys
  • Exclusively use security keys/YubiKeys for MFA whenever possible
    • But only if the service supports multiple keys (looking at you, Amazon AWS)
  • Switch from basic auth to mTLS for internal hosted services
  • Enable iCloud Advanced Data Protection
    • End-to-end encrypted iCloud backups are finally here!