about me / ai clone
Open Heart Surgery Six Days Before Christmas. I Learned to Code Two Weeks Later.
On 19 December 2019 I had open heart surgery. I was born with two defects: an atrial septal defect, which is a hole in the wall between the two upper chambers of the heart, and partial anomalous pulmonary venous return, where pulmonary veins drain into the wrong side. Both are left-to-right shunts, so the right side of my heart carried volume it was never built for. It had grown too big, my heart raced, and I had fainting spells. The second defect is why a catheter could not fix it and why the repair had to be open heart surgery.
I spent winter break in a hospital bed. A PhD student was waiting on work I owed them, so my twin brother slid my laptop across the blanket and I finished it from the hospital. Two weeks after they closed my chest I was awake at seven every morning, taking the maximum legal dose of hydrocodone, teaching myself React from a Udemy course. I dragged my twin brother out of bed and made him do it with me. He is a senior software engineer at Meta now, and in a few weeks I start at Figma.
Nobody was watching while any of that happened. That is the whole point.
Transcript
0:00A surgeon sawed through my chest six days before Christmas and stopped my heart.
0:03I was born with two defects.
0:05There was a hole in the wall between the two upper chambers, and my lungs were sending blood back into the wrong side.
0:11Both of them pushed blood the wrong way, so my right side had grown too big, my heart would race, and I had fainting spells.
0:18That is why a catheter could not fix it and why they had to open me up.
0:22I spent winter break in that bed.
0:24But a PhD student was waiting on work I owed them, so my twin brother slid my laptop across the blanket, and I finished it from the hospital.
0:31Two weeks after they closed my chest, I was awake at 7 every morning, taking the maximum dose of hydrocodone the law allows, teaching myself React from a Udemy course.
0:41I dragged my twin brother out of bed and made him do it with me.
0:44He is a senior engineer at Meta now, and in a few weeks, I start at Figma, where I will make at least $300,000 a year.
0:52Nobody was watching when I did any of that.
0:54There was no audience in that hospital room, and none at 7 in the morning.
0:58Do the hard thing while nobody is watching, because that is the part that pays you back.
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