33 and NYC

Tech bro'ing out in the city of dreams

This month, I turned 33 and moved to New York City! (I’m also getting published!)

Since scorching hot Phoenix is no more, friends might actually visit me. :) Message me if you’re in NYC, whether resident or visitor, friend or foe. Always looking to convert people into friends. I lack time to meet for the next ~three months while tech bro’ing out, so I’m collecting rainchecks here:

What a new year it’s been already! The first month marks new beginnings for everyone, but make it double for January babies. A January birthday can be a curse; people are recovering from the holidays, so our birthdays are understandably an afterthought. Good thing I don’t care much for gifts. Instead, I get to enjoy the dual reset. Or rather, for the first time ever, I’m enjoying the reset; so many Januarys have been basically the same. New year, old me, time and time again. My life was washed in broad strokes of melancholy so normalized that I can only see it in hindsight. For instance, I reread last January’s 32nd birthday post, and while I don’t disagree with its contents, the whole thing reads sort of…dead? This is exciting, because in Lana del Rey parlance, this means I’m finally moving out of Born to Die sadcore into the Lust for Life era. My enlivening can be credited almost entirely to writing online for a year. The other is seeing a psychic in December, but that’s a story for another time. Still, to honor my bio re: enjoying woo, I will indulge in brief esoterica about the number 33 before I get to the New York City good stuff. Rationalists, are you ready to moan and groan?

33

33 is a special number. I tell people that I’m the same age Jesus Christ was when he was crucified. They always laugh in response. I’m not sure why, since I’m just as important as Jesus. That’s why I celebrated in style:

Just kidding. For my birthday, I passed a software engineering test and partied late with my childhood bestie

You don’t even need religious or esoteric significance to know 33 is special. Just look at it. Two threes. A double-triple. 33 is the twin pillar of a triad, and the ultimate triad is of course, the self—ego, id, and superego. So 33 is the self, just doubled and mirrored. Hopefully you’ve cultivated a self you like by 33, because whoever you are is doubling down, for better or worse.¹ But let’s get a little esoteric. In Western numerology, 33 is the ultimate master number: the Master Teacher. A person on life path 33 has an old soul; their duty is to raise humanity’s collective consciousness. Based on their birthdays, my little brother and my childhood bestie’s life paths are 33.² For me, I’m on life path 1, but I’m getting a little dusting of that master number energy in 2026. With that, I end the woo woo. Now let’s return to straight facts: the human spine has 33 vertebrae. Perhaps this is why I enjoyed my birthday this year; I’ve finally grown a spine.

NYC

Now that I’ve chased away the scientific materialists, it’s time for some real talk about New York City. (If you actually want more woo, read the best essay I’ve written so far featuring a hedge fund approved occult ritual).

Why did I move to NYC? To become an AI software engineer at Fractal Tech bootcamp. To be clear, I’m NOT becoming a machine learning engineer. That level of math can’t be crammed in three months, even with 60-70 hour work weeks. But I’ll gain solid foundational knowledge while armed with the latest and greatest AI tooling. It’s strange to make this leap, since I’m no techno-optimist. And despite my attraction to the dreary, I’m no dystopian either. I suit techno-ambivalence, if you allow me to mangle Jacques Ellul. Perhaps I can become a Richard Stallman or Aaron Swarz type of tech-evangelist one day. But first, I have to land a junior developer position. Tough market, I know. But ever since I was a little girl, I’ve dreamed of becoming a shape rotator.

Just kidding! This career switch was a rather impulsive—or intuitive?—decision. Because I started writing online with Write of Passage, I met a friend whose Williamsburg apartment I sublet in August. While subletting, I found Fractal Tech by Googling nearby coworking spaces. Fractal is both a tech hub and a bootcamp, founded by Andrew Rose who I’ve known for about a decade but had lost touch with. This type of serendipity naturally wormed its way into my brain. Plus, while hanging around Fractal, I was unhappily remote working as a Strategy & Ops analyst in Revenue Operations, a fancy way of saying I pull data into dashboards and slides for the C-suite and Board of Directors. After they complimented the latest PowerPoint deck as “the best they’ve seen in twenty years,” I knew I had to GTFO. Spine chilling to imagine that on my gravestone. And where else to leave except to Fractal Tech? It still took some liquid courage to actually give my two-week notice, which management took surprisingly well. In a nutshell, writing really changed my life—the more I wrote from authenticity, the less I could tolerate incongruence in other parts of my life.

I have to say, it’s incredible to quit a great paying job on a whim. My 18-year-old self did my 33-year-old self a real solid. She became independent from her parents and learned to save and invest so that today, risk-taking like this is possible. I say this for context, not to begrudge trust fund kids and/or people with loving parents. You guys have a hard lot, actually. Suffering from success is a real thing. You’ve ascended Maslow’s hierarchy, so now you must face the pain box with the gom jabbar at your neck. I’ve seen many of you become animals to escape the pain of being human. With any luck, I’ll try my hand at the box one day too. Leading a jihad likely isn’t my purpose, but I want to break myself open on the shores of humanity. Test my true potential. Face my fears. Starting with Fractal Tech.

What’s the worse that can happen anyways? I can’t land a software position? I can’t cut it in cutthroat NYC? Oh no, I have to crawl back to the house I own in Arizona, where I can easily make my mortgage behind a Wendy’s dumpster.³ I could even sign up for ICE; they take just about anyone these days. The point is, even if I lose all my money and status and so forth, then I’ll simply return to the station I was born into. From cradle to grave, a poetic poverty circle. If that’s where life path 1 takes me, I accept my fate with a smile.

Because no matter where I go, high or low, nothing can take away my new medium of expression: code. A new way of making something from nothing. I can paint, write, and now I will code. Learning some software engineering has already changed the way I think. You see, computers are dumb but obedient. If their hardware is good, you can order them around with the right syntax, and they’ll work inhumanly fast on many different things at once.⁴ Knowing a dialect of electricity is just the beginning. Software soars to the level of your word puzzle wizardry. With true mastery, you can architect something truly beautiful, like Fallingwater. I realized I’m like a computer, though not in the dumb and obedient sense. I’m rather smart, and quite disobedient. But like any working computer, I’ve always had good hardware. It’s buggy software, spaghetti code written in me since I was a baby, that made me malfunction for so many years. I’m getting really conscious of how much of my programming is debuggable. There’s so many vague and imprecise stories that can be overwritten with precise, beautiful code. Specifically, overwritten by me. I don’t just have read access to my mind; I have write access, too. And there sure is a lot to master.

This realization might be basic, which explains why I’m moving to the arrested development capital of the world.⁵ In New York City, 33 is totally the new 22. But in all seriousness, this move just feels right. New York City is the first place I’m choosing to run towards, not a place I’m running away from.

The city of dreams is where I’ll finally wake up.

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Normally I put “thanks for feedback” here, but this is the first post I’ve made with zero feedback!

I won’t be able to read or write nearly as much as I’d like between February 2 - May 2, so major series like propaganda are on hold. I’ll still try to publish one article a month on Substack, but TBD.

Since Fractal is asking us to write dailies/end-of-days and weekly dev blog posts, I’ll definitely document the tech journey on Substack Notes, probably Posts, and my old Twitter/X account, since the tech talk is mostly still there. I’m rebranding again, this time from crypto e-girl to generic tech bro.

So my fellow wordcels of Substack, enjoy the shape rotation.

1. Interestingly, my YouTube algorithm suggested this video to me soon after January began. Since a guru is saying the same thing I am, it simply must be true:

2. I always knew they were special. My brother is on life path 33 based on one method of calculation, while my best friend is always life path 33 with either method.

3. IYKYK. Shout out to Wall Street Bets.

4. Parallel processing

5. Stolen from Max Nussenbaum