I Have Been Unemployed for One Year

I left Google one year ago as part of a voluntary layoff package. I joined as an L3 Software Engineer and left as an L5 Senior Software Engineer. I worked hard and was very good at my job but I wanted to experience more of the world. In this past year, I have done exactly that.

I spent much of the latter half of 2025 travelling. I went to NYC and LA. I spend time in SF. I visited Europe. In the days that I was travelling, I wrote poetry about love, masculinity, and the obligations that a man has in society. I performed with my poetry to many rooms of people as I travelled and I loved this experience. In Feburary, I came back home.

I grew my website, lifestyle.photo, to $500 MRR. Though it’s not enough to support me, I am very proud of making money from a project of my own for the first time. I studied the Deep Learning Book (Goodfellow), Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (Sutton & Barto), and hand-wrote a lot of code in this new AI era.

The most surprising thing for me has been how slow things move, even when I am fully self determined. I’ve grown into a more well-rounded person in this past year. Still, I love software more than anything else. I’m looking forward to what I do next.

I built an LLM RL Training Pipeline

I LoRA fine-tuned then RL'd Gemma 1B to play the game Takeover in a multi-stage training process. Takeover is a competitive card game with a punishing action economy where your goal is to rid your hand of all your cards as quickly as possible. Takeover is

Concepts That Make Administrative Work Simpler

In your job, you are either delivering your core work product or you are doing administrative meta-work that makes the final delivery easier. If you are an event photographer, your core work is being there; taking the photos. Your meta-work includes scheduling with clients and tracking shoots you

Multipolar Powers

I live in a world that is wholly in my mind and anyone can visit if they bring a song to accompany them. These songs represent the visitor and these songs are the visitors and these songs form the multipolar powers that decide my fate. Through these powers I am

198 Days Post-Google

I took a voluntary layoff from Google ~200 days ago. I have split my time between software, literature, and governance. Previous articles: One Week of Unemployment Two Weeks of Unemployment One Month Out 136 Days of Unemployment These first 6 months were part sabbatical, part work. I am officially back

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I built an LLM RL Training Pipeline

Concepts That Make Administrative Work Simpler

Multipolar Powers

198 Days Post-Google