we spend most of our first year apart and still built an entire world together.

there is no replacement for existing together, i'm certain of this now more than ever—and we're going to do that again as soon as we possibly can. we'll organize mid-afternoon bubble tea runs, conduct 1:1s in the aisles of Dollarama, whiteboard an asynchronous system on a real-life upside-down whiteboard, crowd all of our friends into an office party with the team playlist on shuffle, walk through fire together in the way you only do when it's nine o'clock the night before a Really Important Thing but Everything Is Broken so we lock ourselves in a war room and we fix it. we're going to make all these things happen as soon as we possibly, humanly can. i already know that i'm probably going to full-on sob my heart out the first time that we have the entire team in the same city within hugging distance. there's time for that yet.

in the meantime, i'm thankful for this weird internet existence we built together. i'm thankful for silly matching Google Meet backgrounds and post-midnight-crew Discord chats, fleeting park hangouts and outdoor gatherings on a terrace in 0°C, Among Us and vaporwave-everything and poorly-photoshopped pictures, matching emoji statuses and the entire alternate layer of this company which exists on Twitter, sitting in the dark together but apart, all the time spent conspiring wild plans with you.

2021 will be a whole new game, and the truth is that i'm terrified for it. we're all here building out a shared vision, and sometimes that vision becomes blurry when i'm six hours deep into code which doesn't work. but in the moments when things do work, when blueprints become real things, i'm reminded of exactly how ambitious it really is, how we couldn't build this anywhere else. maybe in another life we exist together in another city, with different teammates and a whole other vision—but it doesn't matter, because we get this one. it's wild that we get to exist here together.

i have a distinct memory of walking out of the Adelaide office sometime in mid-January at the beginning of 2020 and being surprised that it was still light outside. this was only weeks in, before we knew how to exist together—that very early, very awkward phase where neither me or Joanna wanted to leave the office before everyone else. i had forgotten what a winter sunset looked like.

the last rays of light in a pink sky that day were an irrefutable reminder that there would, in fact, be an end to winter—that sunlight would begin to stay a little longer, that tiny bright green things would soon begin to unfurl under our feet, that everything was about to look very different.

right now, at this point in time, on the cusp of something with all of you—it feels a little like that. this moment feels like standing in the liminal space of twilight, staring down a whole new unknown together. i'm excited to make magic together with you this year.

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