Why does another Mass times site exist? Read my story →
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// behind the scenes of building the most accurate mass finder
I built a whole self my mother couldn't find. Funded it, dressed it, gave it its own mailing address. The one time she finally saw it, all she could ask was where the money came from. A 1990s Burnaby childhood, a hidden internet business, and the morning the two selves touched.
A thousand kids watched me get named the instigator. Not long after, I found a world none of them had a login to. A 1990s Hsinchu childhood, a public shaming, and the first door to a place where no one could see me.
I signed up for a wedding fair to sell people thousand-year archival storage. I prepared for an engineering debate. Nobody asked. They were there to pick a DJ.
It's just weed. By the law I'm blameless. But I know what it will do to her. The morning my mom flew across the country to my frat house, and the standard I'm held to because she crossed an ocean for me.
The doctors called it a panic attack. It was more than that. In the hours afterward, I became obsessed with permanence.
Every time I get on a plane to Taiwan, someone else has died. All the immigrant dreams, the ambition, the well-meaning send-offs - it all just funnels down into this. Just deaths. Just people gone.
Western psychotherapy isn't neutral. It's philosophically Protestant. So when I had kids, I carried the weight of both worlds. Then I built an app for my family of five.
I once ran a hip hop blog. Artists flooded my inbox, hungry for a feature. Last week, I got rejected from a job. It got me thinking about who's hungry now.
I called it 'Tinder for Stuff.' Total users: 2. Total revenue: $0. In 2020, this would have been a waste of engineering resources. In 2025, it was the only software worth building.
I spent months cleaning out my mother-in-law's house. Forty years of accumulation. Every object a decision. It changed how I think about what we leave behind.
Winning a hackathon gassed me up in the wrong way. I built a startup, choked, tried therapy, then built a local AI that remembers 28 years of my life.
I was jaded about AI. Web3, metaverse, crypto hype cycles will do that. Then I watched a class of art students become software engineers.
/*
* Building Catholic Index, a church finder.
* Started because I couldn't find confession times.
* 19,000 parishes. Lots of opinions about data.
* This is where I write about it.
*/
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