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The path to 1.0

Captain's Log: Stardate 79936<br>June 23, 2026

Today I released Anukari 1.0.<br>I started working on Anukari full-time in February 2023, so it’s taken over three years of work to get it from a blank code editor to something I am happy to call 1.0. I’m going to take this opportunity to reflect on what the last three years have been like for me.<br>Inception<br>2022 was a complicated year for me. I was still employed by Google, but for most of the year I was on leave, caring for and spending time with my mom, who died that October. My bosses at Google were extremely understanding, and due to the length of my leave they helped me transition my reports to other managers. So when I was ready to come back to work in November, I needed to figure out what my new role would be.<br>I spoke with various teams across Google about some really cool roles. Definitely some stuff that I'd be excited to work on, and some pretty big chunks of responsibility.<br>But in parallel with talking to teams at Google, on the weekends I sketched out ideas for starting my own business. I figured that if I was going to explore my options, I should cover all my bases.

The original concept sketch for Anukari from my business exploration doc.Writing my business ideas was the first time I had truly had fun writing a doc in several years. To be clear, I had a great time working at Google, and had a lot of fun there, but post-pandemic, working remotely, talking to a black plastic rectangle all day, the spark was gone.<br>Also after losing my mom, I was terribly exhausted. I didn't really yet have the energy to ramp up on a high-responsibility position for a new team. But I had exhausted every form of leave available at Google.<br>Ultimately I decided to take a risk. Leave Google, take a break for a couple months, and try starting my own business: Anukari.<br>(Side-note: if you ever check the About menu in Anukari, you'll notice that it's dedicated to Kathy. That's my amazing mom. I wish she could see it.)<br>Breaking ground (and my shoulder)<br>After a couple of months of relaxing, I was itching to build something. In early February I started getting some basic infrastructure set up for Anukari. I was just doing little bits of piecemeal coding here and there, and didn't have any real momentum.<br>Some backstory: I enjoy motorsports. Not so much watching them, as participating in them. My granddad owned an auto shop, so I grew up working on cars, and my dad got me a little 50cc dirtbike when I was a kid. Later I got into autocross, and then full track-days. In late 2021, my wife and I moved from the SF Bay back to our hometown in Arizona, and it wasn't practical to keep my track car. But I couldn't give up motorsports, so I bought a dirtbike to scratch my motorsports itch.<br>A friend taught me how to jump the dirtbike, and I had been riding a lot after leaving Google. I was getting pretty confident.<br>In mid-February, I was practicing powerslides on the dirtbike. Compared to jumping the bike, this didn't feel risky at all. But in one fast powerslide, I hit a rut with the back wheel and high-sided the bike. It launched me face-first into the ground, and then the bike landed on top of me. I didn't lose consciousness, but was dazed. After blinking off the initial shock, I decided I need to get out from underneath the bike, as it was still running, and had a tendency to leak fuel when upside down.<br>That's when I noticed something... not quite working about my right shoulder. Fortunately my friends ran over and got the bike off me, and got me sitting on a log so we could assess the damage. My shoulder was comically bad looking: it was fully dislocated and the ball of the joint was in a really weird spot. It was also fractured, but that wasn't yet apparent.

The ball is a few inches away from its socket. The doctor and I got a good laugh out of how bad it was.The point of this story is that starting in mid-February, I couldn't do anything remotely physical for a few months. Even the gentle motion of walking was super painful.<br>But I found that with a split computer keyboard, there was a really specific place I could put the right half of the keyboard in my lap, and I could type comfortably.<br>This is what really got my momentum going on Anukari. For several months, there was literally nothing I could do except sit at my computer. And while I was writing code, I was completely distracted from the pain. By the time my shoulder started to heal, I had a working prototype and had proved to myself that Anukari was worth building for real.<br>So: busting my shoulder had a silver lining!<br>Early milestones<br>During the first few weeks of working on Anukari, my goal was to decide whether it was worth investing more effort into. So I was writing the hackiest, most down-and-dirty code that I could, trying to avoid wasting any time on "professionalizing" things until I was certain that the results were interesting enough to...