Context Switching is a Skill You Can Build

Context switching results in productivity loss, this is a known problem. Going to Google Scholar and typing "context switch productivity loss" will get you a ton of papers on that, you also have personal experience about it. I'm here to tell you that the ability to context switch can be acquired through practice.

I'm very good at context switching. At Heroku I ran 7-9 projects in parallel at any given time (yes it burned me out, do not do that) and I was able to maintain productivity jumping between contexts, ship good stuff on time and give good estimates. Frankly it's because I practiced it, and there are two parts to this:
1 - My life experiences
2 - Actual practices that I've found to be useful

1 cannot be reproduced but 2 certainly would be useful to anyone looking to get better at context switching. Feel free to jump directly to 2, just search for "Here's What You Do To Get Better at Context Switching"

Now allow me the luxury of talking about 1, I'm going to get very personal:

Being a Primary and Solo Caretaker Made Me Good at Context Switching

Stage 1 of Ti's Development: Working While Caretaking

Here's the thing, in a single parent household, you are essentially always on-call. That meant I had two jobs, one as a software engineer, one as mother and head of household -- project runner of education, picker-upper of child, make the food appear and make the garbage go away, make the clothes clean and make the bills paid, coordinate the other parent, coordinate school activities, coordinate child's friends, coordinate healthcare, plan birthday parties, plan camps, plan lessons, plan next steps.

I only have 24 hours.

I wasn't good at context switching at the very beginning. I'm autistic, I have ADHD, I was your typical youth who had a hard time moving from one task to the next, did the hyper focus thing, did the can't move my attention away thing.

Life trained me.

It was the autumn of 2013, my mom had just passed away in Vancouver that summer. I'd just flown back from Vancouver to Paris after taking care of her after affairs. The three of us, me, my then-husband, and my 1-year-old, lived in a studio apartment in the 17th arrondissement, blocks away from where Liam Neeson questioned sex workers for clues in Taken(2008) (https://movie-locations.com/movies/t/Taken-2008.php). I was raw from grief, a new mom, barely out of university, and I needed to provide. All I had was flexible time and my language skills in fluent Chinese, English, and barely adequate French. The apartment was beautifully decorated when we moved in, later we found out it was infested with cockroaches and had massive mold issues.

I picked up a lot of work doing translations and copy writing for Chinese and European companies wanting to break into different markets, and of course the occasional on-site interpretation for business meetings. My strength was my understanding of different business cultures and my language skills. My weakness was the fact that I had a 1-year-old who needed my attention consistently for healthy development.

So I'd developed a routine of context switching between work and parenting. I don't think I'm the only one who does this, during the heights of COVID wfh a lot of parents had to jump between "attend to child" and "attend to work". The human brain is amazing, so the longer I did this, the better I got at it. At first it was tricky to get up and hang out with baby for fifteen minutes, then get back and furiously type for thirty -- it would take me some amount of time to recall my thread of thought and get back to speed, but that time grew shorter each time I had to do it.

I gained those skills, I simply had to.

Stage 2 of Ti's Development: Doing Too Many Things at Once

Moving forward to 2 years later -- by this point I'd moved back to Vancouver with The Child, freshly divorced, and trying to make two startups happen WHILE working still as a translator and interpreter in community healthcare and legal settings -- because that's what you do when you were in your twenties and thought you knew how companies worked from working with so many, didn't really know much better, and had no one to tell you otherwise.

The Child was now away at daycare for most of the day, and I had plenty of focus time, but I still needed to context switch between all the things I was handling, including some volunteer translation stuff on the side. Frankly, I think I just needed to keep myself busy because grieving for a parent and a marriage at the same time was simply too much.

Stage 3 of Ti's Development: A Regression

If it's a skill that you can gain, then it's a skill you can lose by not practicing. Fast forward to 2017 -- I did a bootcamp because, well who's surprised that Ti's two startups didn't work out? I learned a lot of things about what not to do, those were valuable lessons, and I was eager to apply them but with a different set of skills.

Turns out I was pretty good at coding. I graduated from the Lighthouse Labs, top of the cohort with several references, and ended up joining a project headed by the bootcamp's head instructor. Side note Lighthouse Labs really did have a great curriculum, it was so practical -- I walked out knowing Ruby and JavaScript, able to build a full-stack app and deploy it with simple Cloud integrations like Heroku and AWS S3 (whoo boy did baby dev ti ever consider "one day I would be working at Heroku" not at all, I was entirely mesmerized by the new world I discovered), knowing how to pick between relational and non-relational databases, drawing an ERD -- all good pragmatic stuff. Really built me well.

Anyways -- by this point The Child was in kindergarten, and I had most of the work day to myself. In this project formed with all bootcamp graduates, I was the most senior guy -- it really got to my head. For the first time in my professional life I enjoyed long hours of uninterrupted focus time, and it was magnificent. I think I became the brilliant asshole, and I got some good feedback on that. When people interrupted me to ask for help with setting up their dev environment, or to integrate with an API I wrote, I got cranky and it showed. I bought into the whole "don't make me context switch or I'll lose my productivity", and I'd forgotten -- context switching was a muscle I'd trained and let go. I'd regressed in my skills, and when I got the feedback, I deeply introspected.

I went back to the drawing board.

Stage 4 of Ti's Development: Undependable Dependencies

So, here's the thing, just because a baby is now a child and then a preteen and then a teen, doesn't mean they don't require constant attention. Good parenting means you have to be there, pick-ups, drop-offs, school emails, healthcare appointments, afterschool activities, birthday parties -- all of this, you need to juggle them alongside your work obligations. Between that very first project and me finally breaking into Big Tech by getting recruited to Hashicorp, there was a lot of Ti flexing that muscle of context switching.

I had a live-in partner, we dated for two years, and lived together for three -- we actually moved in together right around the time when I did the bootcamp. He had been a great help with school pick-up and drop-offs, I was very grateful for that. But once we parted, I had to make alternative arrangements -- and these were not always dependable. It was easier when I was at Hashicorp, that was during the COVID lockdown, but once The Child was back to school and I was at Heroku, things got kind of intense for me.

The job as tech lead of the Production Engineering(then Tools) Operation Experiences team was handed to me, it had felt like. Two years later after massive success in that role I'd asked the hiring manager, whom I'd had conflicts with but then resolved but then conflicted but then resolved (because ultimately he is a very good dude and so am I, I mean how could I ever not respect and admire someone who spent a ton of time helping me change my outward facing name from my government ID name to my preferred name?? Without even knowing whether I would succeed yet? That's allyship.), did he hire me because nobody else wanted the job? He reassured me no, there were other candidates and you were the best and frankly it was hard for me to believe it, call it humility, I don't know.

Heroku Went Through Things during my stay there, the Big Security Incident that traumatized everyone? I was the first responder on scene, along with Good Dude Hiring Manager. Boy did a lot of work come out of that, along with the previous threads of work, suddenly I was running 7-9 projects at any given time -- reporting up, down, peripherally, cross team, cross org, upwards backwards circle spiral zoom in zoom out. I was still coding too, and still parenting. Interfacing with 20 something teams within Heroku and across Salesforce security, compliance, and SR orgs, How did I do it?

The undependable dependencies.

I really couldn't count on the people in my life that was helping with Child's daily pick-up, and I couldn't count on my neurodivergent gifted child to go through a school day without some sort of action I would need to take (Child, if you are reading this -- it's ABSOLUTELY not your fault, that's what neurodivergent gifted kids do, you are not a burden!!! I love doing this for you.). So by default, I worked as if every minute I would have to get up and leave my seat and do something else completely different, then come back.

This manifested in an extremely efficient and modular work style, and I learned to do things like "leave incubation time for walking to pick child up from school, think on this RFC while you walk over, come back home reserve time to write it, code 30 minutes before bed because that's the only no interrupt time". I did a lot of work on my phone, when I could.

I did not take any focus time for granted. I was not gifted that luxury. My kid needed me, my team needed me, I needed to code, review, mentor, write, present, consult, advocate, and I needed time for me so I can shitpost and keep the sad overworked Ti placated. Working in a company with a remote-first culture helped, everyone in distributed timezones, in fact my entire immediate team was in Argentina and I was the only Canadian. This style of dive-in dive-out flexible schedule work really helped with keeping stuff running.

Eventually this amount of overwork became unsustainable and I collapsed but I remain good at context switching, even throughout my medical leave and career break. It's wild how much life throws at you as a middle aged adult, the tracks of work I need to handle between my own career and household stuff also float between 7-9.

Ok, hope you liked reading about my life experiences, I have good stories, that was the top level.

Here's What You Do To Get Better at Context Switching

1 - Structured Project Organization Paired With Bread Crumbs

Context switching is awful because we lose track of thought, so having structured organization that is easy and concise to read helps with that. I have a project doc for every project I run, I take it from company to company and it has worked out well: https://gist.github.com/nombiezinja/ecc26a4923c99d283eb900b40ab43139

There are a lot of writings out there by actual project managers with more expertise than me, so I won't elaborate further. I'm just here as an engineer telling other engineers: listen this stuff is useful for context switching, so you should do it even if it's really annoying and all you want to do is code, I get it I'm that way too.

To supplement the formal documentation you need breadcrumbs: these are more personal. Keep a personal work log with context and thought dumps of what you are doing, but make sure to keep sensitive details out of this log, so that if it is compromised it would not compromise your system's integrity and your personal integrity. This log is meant for you to pick back up where you started. So the format of this could be: before you jump into a meeting that you just got pulled into, write down the last 30 minutes of work that you just did, dump all the questions in your head into a file. This will MASSIVELY reduce the amount of time it takes for you to dive back into focus time after being in a different context. You can clean this up later, see 3

2 - Avoid Wastage in Emotional Energy

Our energy is a bucket, and it should be spent with intention. I do not like to waste, so one thing that has benefited me is to not waste any emotional energy on feeling annoyed or frustrated about being interrupted. I have come to accept it as the norm rather than the abnormal -- this helps me with just taking and rolling with it. If you can shift your cognitive perspective to accepting "context switching is a must in my life/job" and go along with it, then you spend a lot less time and mental energy being angry about it -- you can devote that to solving the problems you need to solve.

3 - Daily and Weekly Rituals

If you context switch a lot you could risk losing sight of the bigger picture, and you could lose sight of priorities. You could also risk losing alignment. So here's what I do to avoid that:

• Daily end-of-day ritual of work log review

  • What did I do today, how much was interrupted, what does that mean for our priorities

  • What do I need to bring up with my bosses/team/collaborators after parsing the above

  • Have I scrubbed sensitive info from this log (see 1)

  • What do I plan to do tomorrow based on the data from today

• Daily start-of-day ritual of work log review

  • Consolidate data from people's updates from different timezones, adjust priorities accordingly

  • Intake interrupts, re-prioritize accordingly

  • Communicate with bosses/team/collaborators for these decisions

  • Look at schedule of the day and assign types of work to types of time slots throughout the day(e.g. "well looks like i have 2 hours between meetings, I will leave that for this code I have to write. i have to go fetch this data for ___ that would be 15 minutes, i can do that right before i leave to pick up child.)

• Weekly ritual of weekly work log review

  • Similar to the above, but with week as a unit

• Quarterly

  • Seriously I feel like I'm repeating myself, but...

• Annually

  • Yup you guessed it lol

Conclusion

Context switching is a skill, and a muscle you can practice. Yes it causes you to lose productivity, but if we spent less time complaining and being angry about it and more time getting good at it, we can become really good at it.

Of course, there's related topics like "how do we minimize context switch" "what kind of context switch is valuable vs not valuable" "meeting hygiene" -- that would be for another discussion.

The child that I folded paper cranes for just made me a paper bouquet.

When I first moved to Vancouver from Europe, my mom had just passed away and I was freshly separated. I had no friends in Vancouver, everyone I knew was elsewhere. It was a brand new city to me, other than the fact that my mom had spent the last few of her years here I had no ties to it. It had been just Child and I. It was freeing, but I was also very alone.

I took Child everywhere with me since I had no childcare and was still waitlisted for daycare. I'd bring them lots of activities, puzzles, little toys, books, et cetera. The weight of things factored into what I brought too because I walked everywhere, so a lot of the times it's just luke, me, and a backpack. If there are no stairs involved in the planned trip, maybe a stroller.

I brought paper with us a lot.

We'd do little paper crafts. I'd make them little paper boats, paper airplanes, paper cranes. that was the extent of my origami skills. I got them origami books and we'd follow along. paper was easy to carry around and keep a child entertained, paper was cheap both in cost and carrying space.

For my 37th birthday Child gave me an origami bouquet of roses and tulips, and a water lily. They were made with colourful post-it notes, neon green, orange, and pink. They are delicately folded, lovingly curled at the tips. I think, in my moment of over joy I froze. This little child of mine, who refuses to fold a piece of paper edge to edge with a clean slat across the middle, this little child of mine who shoves their homework into their backpack with a punch-like motion -- they sat in repose and folded post-it notes into little roses and tulips, dozens of water lily petals. Where did they find the stillness and patience?

When Child gave me the flower bouquet, it was with a soft timidness, almost embarrassment. "I was going to make you lilies, " they said, "because you love lilies but we can't have lilies at home any more because lilies are toxic for cats." They wanted to make some marigolds too, but they didn't have time. "Oh and the roses, they kept falling out, I lost a few." They lower their little head, they sounded sad and defeated. "Also my friend M made a flower too, but I forgot to put it in the bouquet."

"But they look so great!" Partner and I chimed in. "They look fantastic! Why are you focusing on what you didn't achieve, you did amazing!"

Child brightened up a little, and I watched their little face get less and less scrounged up as I continued to marvel at how beautifully crafted they were. Suddenly they sat up and began muttering -- "It's really poetic you know." "What's really poetic?" "How some roses were lost, but the bouquet is still good, it's kind of like you mom, you lived all these lives, you are all these people, you've fallen a lot but you always get back up."

I think, at that moment my autistic brain went into overwhelm mode, and I was no longer able to process additional input. A warm wave of emotions rose up in me like a gentle tide as I thought of little Child, aged three or four, clumsily following my lead to make a paper crane with their toddler fingers. Us all alone all these years until I met Partner.

The little child that I made paper cranes for made me a beautiful paper bouquet, and saw me for who I am. This little child is growing into their own person, and recognizes my personhood beyond being their mother. All those years of carrying the load of a single parent, I kept making mistakes and feeling awful about them. I worried about the mistakes permanently hurting Child somehow, I worried I was failing or not enough or not too much but in this moment I knew I did it, it was a success. The child that I folded paper cranes for just made me a paper bouquet.

It has taken me an entire day to sit in these feelings, writing this helped me process them some more. If you love a child, you try and try and try, you talk and talk and talk, they will blossom like a flower given the appropriate soil and sun. How reassuring this is.

Little bouquet of paper tulips and roses, neon orange, green, and pink, tied with a pink ribbon, preserved in a plastic box display case against the chilly city night lights

Press F for Ti's Job

Today is my last day at Heroku – I’m passing on the torch of workplace memelord and shitposter to all the cool people still doing cool things there! This was simultaneously a very easy and a very difficult decision – easy because the path is clear, difficult because, well, of course, leaving is difficult. I did a lot of introspection and spoke to a lot of insightful friends. One friend asked a question that clicked everything into place for me: did you finish telling the story you wanted to tell? I sat on that and thought deep and hard about it, and I decided I did. 

Towards the end of my stay, a fellow engineer said to me in a watercooler chat:  “When you first joined, I saw what you looked like and thought to myself – this is going to be interesting. Then I saw your technical work and your presentations – I changed my mind, wow you really know what you’re doing! I really respect the different perspectives you bring, you’ve really changed my mind.” 

As you can imagine, it was a pretty awkward moment for everyone in the chat as they waited for me to react. On my part though – I thought it was incredibly brave and authentic of my coworker. I thanked him. What he said wasn’t anything shocking – many thought it, but he said it out loud. That authenticity and courage, and willingness to change his mind – that was incredible. 

So, similar sentiments from him and others expressed to me in various settings consolidated this validation for me: yes, I have told the story I wanted to tell at Heroku, and it was a good one. I was able to tell that story because Heroku is a special place full of cool people. Looking back, I am so grateful for the trust I was given to spin up and carry out large-scale transformative projects, to inherit critical legacy systems, to be given the autonomy for impactful architectural and process decisions, to build a team from scratch, to create its charter, agreement, and vision, to collaborate with Heroku teams and Salesforce security teams. These are opportunities of privilege, I am so proud of the work I did with my team, and I am so grateful for the space I was given to make an impact.

I am also full of gratitude for the psychological safety I felt, I had fun at work, I was authentically me and it made work enjoyable. Naming a greenfield service uwu in 2022 and presenting it with a deck named “The Great Uwuification of Heroku'', using the naming to gently call-in our culturally appropriative naming traditions may have been my career shitposting high point. Heroku was a place that empowered me to carry out meaningful technical and cultural transformations like this. 

With the services I operated and built, the technical papers I wrote and presented, and the cool people I met and befriended – Heroku has let me tell this chapter of my story: that you can be authentic at work, that you can have fun but be technically rigorous at the same time, that security is not just a checklist, that maintainability isn’t just a dream, that observability can be done inside-out and outside-in, that event-driven architecture can bring so much value to a legacy system, that on-call shouldn’t just be unaddressed suffering, that we don’t have to pit our solutions against each other, that we can solve problems together.

I’m now ready to move on to the next chapter of my story! First thing up, this weekend I will be getting married to my long-distance partner, co-mentor, and best friend. I will then spend some time in China to take care of some personal business – my grandmother passed away in 2022, and I was too caught up with work to handle the inheritance affairs. I have been doing more tech things for my own life, I have been doing more art and writing. My personal backlog has stagnated for a while, so I will be taking the next few months off to handle them one by one. 

Quitting without an offer in this market is my decision to prioritize forward momentum by taking a step back. Sometimes a pause and reorientation is the best way to ensure we are going the right direction. I offer a unique set of skills that combines enterprise and start-up experience, infra and product engineering, technical and human-centric platformization across application, security, and compliance. When I’ve dealt with my personal backlog, there will be teams that would benefit from my help with these skills. Grateful to friends who have spoken to me about these needs in the last few months and shared job opportunities, grateful for all the good places where good people can do good work.  

This will be the first break I am taking in adulthood and single parenthood. It feels like I have been sprinting and running and building – now I get to be happy with what I’ve made, and I get to take a break. I’m so pumped to solve my next set of technical problems, my brain is bored and ready for challenges – I’m aching to read and write code, I’m pining for an architecture thing I can jump on, but I know more rest will make that next step more fun! 

So, I leave with you the meme I made for my Heroku buds on my last day – here’s the thing, work can and should be fun and meaningful, we all must work, so why not have fun and meaning? Here’s to the next chapter, and cheers to transformation in all shapes and forms!

Why Elon Musk's Adoption of Chinese Big Tech Practices Will Not Help Western Tech Companies Make More Money

I sense that the tech industry in the west is moving towards a direction guided by leaders like Elon Musk, who has demonstrated to a degree that certain practices will pay off and would not destroy a system. Being in communication with many ICs and leaders from all over the world, including China, I can say that these practices are extremely reminiscent of patterns that can be observed in Chinese big tech, with the goal of maximizing bottomline and reducing costs. Here's why it won't work for the west and why treating your employees well is actually better for making more money:

There is this schedule called 996(9AM to 9PM, 6 days a week) in China that I'm sensing the west is inching towards in an implicit but not too subtle way. There is also a phenomenon happening in China where tech workers over the age of 35 are being laid off and rejected from interviews with big tech; in some cases this even goes as low as 30.

China is able to afford this due to having demographic dividend, the size of fresh labour supply means Chinese big tech companies can continue to hire waves of new grads, have them go through the pipeline of 996, produce, and lay them off once they hit the age where they begin to self-advocate and push back. In order to continue to have access to the demographic dividend of labour supply, China is also utilizing meta strategies like having women return to the family, encouraging births.

In Chinese big tech companies, work is segmented, collaboration is discouraged, competition between teams and orgs is encouraged. Promotions and career paths are not paved with collaboration but rather self-serving as a group or as an individual. Technical work and service ownership is divided piecemeal manner to facilitate IC replaceability. This pattern can also be found in a lot of western enterprises.

The strategy of "get rid of expensive big thinkers, hire implementers at scale, tell them to do small thing, they do thing, move fast go brrr, replace if it doesn't work out" has worked for China so far but it is at cost, and this isn't a cost that the west can afford in the long term. We continue to see the outcomes in terms of security incidents and reliability issues across tech in various shapes and formats. this is the cost.

The west does not have access to the kind of demographic dividend China does, and Elon Musk's school of thought for how-to-run-a-company simply does not work, because there is no mathematical grounds for doing this type of labour replacement. Also, segregating ownership and having ICs only do piecemeal work is how innovation and joy is killed. The same workforce can produce very different work when they are motivated intrinsically vs under the threat of survival. The best software is built with heart, when people care about the business, security/compliance/reliability becomes real goals rather than checklists.

Companies at all sizes will see better business outcomes when their software is built and maintained by happier people, because there are so many nuanced ways you can save cost, improve security posture, improve inheritability, reduce toil -- it depends on whether people are motivated to think about it, experiment, and do it. This will not be achieved by adopting labour practices from parts of the world that have demographic dividend and can take advantage of large labour supply.

One could argue that leveraging global inequality and replacing western employees with employees in countries with lower cost of living is how leaders expect to solve this problem. However -- different constraints produce different engineering practices, and once those practices are brought into an existing system, there will be a period of clash and friction while everyone figures out how to work with an entire new set of implicit social rules, this has cost on the software systems being maintained. Energy that could be devoted to making better software goes elsewhere, and culture shifts with adopted practices. These adopted practices are often products of survival-driven development in highly competitive countries with large labour supplies, and do not optimize for security, reliability, and performance.

Incidents are expensive, can you imagine the amount of salaries spent on recovery and mitigating impact? Prevention is the best method, and solid software systems build by good people with heart are what is defensible and reliable. At this point I'd like to introduce a Daoist concept from Laozi: 清新治本，直道谋身 -- for all systems, the root cause/foundation can be fostered and healed with ethical authenticity, new paths can be built with direct and kind conduct. Humans evolved by collaborating and community building, we are able to achieve the degree of scientific advancement because people work with each other and exchange information -- eliminating the collaborative spirit to foster competition in order to reduce cost on salaries will only produce fallible systems, which will end up costing more upon failure.

Personally, I'm grateful to have worked with many leaders who share similar sentiments. Viewing operator happiness as a part of the health of a complex system is how we achieve success, and because of this mindset I was enabled to do my best work at Heroku. When ICs are motivated intrinsically, they produce their best output. This may be a good opportunity to say that my medical leave has been accidentally extended to June 30th due to a miscommunication with the company that handles medical leaves with Salesforce -- which actually ends up being beneficial because I do have some explorative procedures lined up for next steps around my health. A company that treats its employees well will also get the best work out of them, and the delta between ok-work and best-work can be directly translated into money when it comes to metrics like Mean Time Between Failures. My gratitude goes to Salesforce and Heroku for giving me the time and space to take care of my health and produce these thoughts, and all the leaders that have contributed to them.

Thanks for making it to the end of this read, here’s a cool sunset for you: 天高地阔，流水行云 - sky is high, the earth is wide, water flows and clouds drift, everything has its natural order, we retain inner peace by acknowledging that and doing our best to go with the order of things, such is the way.

Finding Meaning In work Without Making Work the Meaning: Lessons from My Medical Leave

Around September 2023 I hit a downward spiral, working too hard and eating too little.  Unintentionally, I’d lost 30lbs, which was a lot for a 5’1’’ person. Hitting goals, getting things done, consolidating project milestones and checking off things that mattered, but what really mattered? I thought I was ruthlessly prioritizing, but rapidly I deteriorated. In November I fell ill and ended up in urgent care. As a single parent in tech, it had been a while coming. Everyone else saw it before I did, I was running on fumes – frankly with the level of performance I was hitting on top of the parenting duties, it’s a miracle I did not collapse sooner. 

Everything has a price and my price comes in the form of a weird little 3 cm mass that we now need to investigate – is this cancer or not. I’m not super pressed about it, a lot of cancer is manageable with current science. My mother was afflicted with adenoid cystic carcinoma, she was diagnosed at the age of 46, and passed away at the age of 51. The oncologist I saw has let me know that I potentially have something just as rare, but of course there is a good chance it is nothing. Since I’ve been having symptoms for around a year or two, it is not aggressive enough to do major damage to me right away.

I’m grateful to my workplace for being able to go on a five-month medical leave with partial pay. This time-off may have potentially saved my life. Around the time when it all started, I was not convinced that I would physically survive this. I would collapse from being unable to hold myself up, one time it happened in a parking lot, my vision white static, shuddering in pain and cold sweat, so weak my partner had to hold me up by the arms. There were also times when I could not conjure enough energy to move my limbs or sit upright. I ended up using a cane for a few months. Having exercised diligently for most of my adult life, I suddenly could not walk for five minutes without needing to sit down and catch my breath.Each human is a complex system, and I was one that had depleted my own stock. 

My brain was in a jumble too, I couldn’t figure out the most simple things – I’d experienced a cognitive injury. Burnout slammed into me like a bag of bricks and stomped all wherewithal out of my brain. Miraculously I was able to handle parental duties – cooking, cleaning, drop-offs, pick-ups. I was barely making things happen but it was happening: ten years of single parenthood, many things became muscle memory. It must have been miraculous timing that I’d met someone and fallen in love just before all this – my long-distance partner drove seven hours from Portland every few weeks in order to support me. 

Neighbours, friends, current and former coworkers all chipped in with things like garbage, groceries, school pick up and drop off. But anything new was impossible - my partner got me ice bags to aid with my autistic shutdowns, yet it was weeks before I realized why they weren’t working right: I did not remove the packaging. My brain was too broken to figure out that a product needs to be out of the package to be used. I would sit down to watch TV, but could not figure out how to work the remote. I would read or try to listen to a podcast, but nothing was registering. Pain and fatigue was all I knew, I struggled to make it through a single day. I would listen to music but music would be too overstimulating for me. I’d hit a wall of autistic burnout

However, gradually I got better. Tons of therapy, introspection, confronting myself, talking to people who love me. Looking back, looking forward, looking within. I’m walking out of this experience with lessons in hand, and I’d like to share them with those who may resonate.

What It Means To Give 100%

There is this myth of the coasting worker. I’m sure those exist, but certainly not in my circle. Humans need intellectual stimulation, we need meaning and joy in work. People go out of their way to find this, so oftentimes we find ourselves giving more than we can afford. Research shows intrinsic motivation is what gets things done, rather than extrinsic motivation. When we figure out ways to align work with our internal beliefs, work becomes play. This is incredibly important – how else will we find joy in a capitalistic society of non-stop churn? If you must do it, then enjoy it, figure out ways to enjoy it. 

My downfall was to enjoy it a little too much. Giving it 100% meant at the end of the workday I was in zombie mode. I would log off, pick up my kid, cook, clean, and have a bare minimal conversation with my kid then put them to bed. It felt like a second job, I did not reserve any energy to spend time together, I spent it all at work. Every school email correspondence felt heavy, everywhere I turned it was just obligations. As it turns out, I was giving more than 100%, I was in deficit. 

There is always this push-pull when it comes to work and personal life, it’s the perpetual problem we are all trying to solve in our own way. I think I should have deliberately reserved some brain for after work – especially for an autistic person, this means allocating cognitive resources around socialization. My kid deserves more than a churned out mom. 

Fortunately during my medical leave we have really come together and had a lot of good conversations. This has been a good learning experience for them too. 

Who We Work With is More Important Than What We Work On

As a complex systems thinker, solving problems brings joy in and of itself. A pattern in my career is I end up owning problems in different domains. The domain itself does not matter, I can handle identity, integration, cloud computing, platformization, networking, observability, DNS, big data wrangling, generic API things, infrastructure as code – at the end of the day a complex systems problem is a complex systems problem, and my job as a software engineer is to apply pattern matching abilities, which are transferable across domains. I used to think that it is the content of the work that brings me joy, but looking back I realize at every job it’s always the incredible people I meet that made it worth it. 

When you deal with chronic pain, a lot of thinking happens. I combed through the good and bad moments that got me where I am, and really realized that a job is a good job because of the people. I relish in the intellectual honesty and rigour, sparks in thought exchanges, I have so much fun with the good people I work with, and they are what makes it matter. This is probably why I like to make software for software people – be it a customer-facing product or an internal tool, I love seeing the impact of my work on its users. 

I know there is this school of thought that’s like “don’t make friends with your coworkers”, but I’m not a fan of that. Surely not every coworker is your friend, but many friends come from coworkers. During my medical leave, I’ve received helping hands from so many coworkers, both current and former. At this point, they are friends I work with or would like to work with. For the next steps in my career, I’d like to continue working with good people. Any problem can be interesting, but good teams are the foundation for good communities, and good communities are how we can continue to build and shine in a fast-paced world. 

Internal Exhaustion

I learned about this from the Chinese internet. Where 996 rose to become a paradigm (and subsequently officially suppressed), wisdom arose from the community. I was introduced to this concept called 内耗 – internal exhaustion. When you are experiencing internal conflict, you are spending energy being torn, and that energy expended adds on top of everything else. If we can come to peace with how we are, who we are, what we do, why we do, we put an end to the internal exhaustion. No more feeling bad about being at work and thinking of unfulfilled personal obligations, and no more feeling bad about being unproductive when taking a rest. When we clock in to work, we give what we can reasonably give while maintaining system stasis and health. When we clock out, we do not feel bad about clocking out. When we are committed to a goal, we do not doubt it – we may stop to reevaluate ever so often as it is healthy, but the reevaluation is to be done with an intended outcome. Every decision we make and every path we take comes with tradeoffs, embracing the consequences full-heartedly after rigorous study and preparation is how we achieve maximum efficacy and joy.  

Mindful and Malleable Attachment to a Project

This is a problem everyone experiences at one point or another in their career. When we seek meaning in work and let work define our identity, we are getting attached to the projects we do. We end up seeing the success and failure of projects as personal. This is a dangerous way to be because while it is healthy to align personal growth goals with organizational growth goals, there is no way for executors to fully understand and predict organizational movement paths. 

In business we are solving ill-defined problems(I’m using the definition by Walter Reitman in "Heuristic decision procedures, open constraints, and the structure of ill-defined problems", Human Judgments and Optimallty. Wiley, N. Y. 1964) everyday. People in strategic leadership positions are responsible for defining the start state, end state, and operators of ill-defined problems, transforming ill-defined problems to well-defined problems. This is often a painful and drawn out process, and healthy outcomes involve a lot of information exchange both horizontally and vertically. A flip side to this is often executors do not see the full picture, macrosystem conditions and demands can change the problem definition or even what problem to solve; also sometimes the boundaries between executor and strategy definer can be ambiguous, which adds to the scope. Therefore, when we get too attached to projects, we lose the flexibility to run with the ever-changing problem definition and identification of problems. A healthy organization requires its executors to have malleable and mindful attachments to projects, in Chinese we call this 拿得起放得下: one can pick it up and put it down. Another saying in Chinese: 在其位谋其政，任其职尽其责 - holding the position means thinking about the responsibilities relevant to that position, thorough thinking about that very position yet not beyond that. Sometimes overextending creates a cost, and that cost was my health. My problem was I had a hard time putting down projects when it was time to, and I worked myself into a corner. 

Mentorship Necessitates An Experiential Component

There are two types of people in the world, those who say “hey I went through this, it was awful, now you don’t have to”, and those who say “I went through this, it was awful, so it’s only fair you go through it too”. I think of impactful and community-minded mentorship as the first type of people transferring skills to enable more people like these. I still think this applies – but I’ve changed my mind on the specifics. 

There were things I did right and will continue to do as a mentor: provide opportunities, give space, dive in and out as needed, create a psychologically safe space for asking for help and for challenging. This also requires a healthy environment that can tolerate mistakes, because sometimes mentorship is about letting people make mistakes. To have the room to grow, people need to be able to make mistakes, but also be entrusted with things with the expectations that they will very likely succeed. The combination of trust and the room to make mistakes is what grows goodness, this holds true in both parenting and mentorship/coaching/friendship/relationship. 

There were things I will refine, which I sat with for a long time. A lot of lessons and learnings are ineffable – without having the experience, stories just do not hit. Repeating yourself does not mean things will be heard, sometimes it really is about creating the space to have the experience, then surfacing the pattern and lesson for the learner. The learner has to have the mindset to receive in order for the lesson to be heard, and a lot of the times the environment is not set up for that, then more verbal teaching just ends up being very preachy. This would not constitute effective mentorship. 

Learning is Implicit , and Trauma Recovery is Eventually Consistent 

When I ended up in urgent care, I’d thought it was my body that was broken: I was in pain, I could not eat or sleep. I could not move. My joints ached, everything hurt. I hit a wall in terms of system exhaustion and somehow I had enough hubris to believe that my brain was unaffected – I was wrong. My brain was broken too. I realized this the day after I went on medical leave. My partner had accompanied me to urgent care, then they had to drive back to Portland. They were in town for a week so I could go to Kubecon, and right after Kubecon I had collapsed. They had their own life too – we decided it was healthy for them to drive away even though it was clear I was in no shape to handle a household. In hindsight it was a good decision, the solitude gave me time to think, and like aforementioned my community came together to catch me in distress, so I was not really alone after all. 

It was a sunny day, rare for Vancouver in November. The air was crisp and you could smell the fall. I’d dropped off my kid at school and struggled to boil myself an egg for lunch – the fatigue and pain combined was so much, and there was a lot of paperwork I needed to do in order to actually start my medical leave – a lot of appointments, emails, phone calls. It was all so daunting, and I didn’t know whether I was making the right choice. I ate my boiled egg slowly, it tasted and smelled very rotten. I quietly began to panic and was convinced that this was parosmia from COVID . For a very brief yet very perpetual and still moment there, I believed I had caught COVID from Kubecon and had given it to my kid and my partner, all as a result of building my career. Time stood still for me while the crisp autumn air blew through my balcony doors, and I sat there eating my rotten egg for a while. 

Then I realized that I had switched to a meal service instead of cooking weeks ago, because I’d had no time to cook or eat, so I was drinking soylent and eating baby food and giving catered meals to my kid.  As a result the eggs in the fridge were very old and no longer good – the eggs were actually rotten, I did not have COVID. I was, however, completely and thoroughly burned out, body, mind, and soul. I got up and threw away the rotten egg, then I cried and decided I was going to work on fixing what’s broken. 

For the next few months I focused on getting well. I threw all my available energy at navigating the collapsing Canadian healthcare system, weekly therapy, physiotherapy, introspection. Lots and lots of conversations with my partner, my kid, my dad, and my friends. I’ve reconnected with people, mended connections lost to the overwhelming anthem of work. Slowly the fatigue got better and I was able to walk around without a cane again, and then the pain began to get better too. Leaf by leaf I turned over all three decades of my time on earth and figured out a lot of things I did not want to confront, connected the pieces and put them together. I worked so hard on myself, all the energy that went to work went to me, and as a result I am more ready for work than ever – and work is what I enjoy, frankly. The brain needs food, I am under stimulated if I am not intellectually challenged. I did nothing wrong in deriving meaning from work, what I could have done better is where to draw the line. 

This was a painful process: facing things I’d forgotten, confronting decisions I’d made and making peace with them. Processing trauma with an inward facing stance means we are building power from within, but it takes time. There were moments where I wondered if I would ever recover, but those passed and I found my footing. 

Most of the learning we do is implicit (see research), and incubation is key to creativity(more research). This is why trauma recovery is eventually consistent: if we keep doing the right things, the complex system that is our brain and body will work with us and catch up. While we do things like rest, enjoy ourselves, introspect, journal, art, talk with friends, look at sunsets, our brain and body is running background daemons to patch things up. Give yourself the time and space to breathe and relax, lean into it and recovery will happen. I’m glad I was patient with myself. 

Don’t Forget: We Are Here to Look At Sunsets and Clouds

The day after I ate the rotten egg I walked to pick up my kid from school. The walk that used to take me less than 30 minutes took me an hour, and by the time I got there I was sweating and near throwing up. I had not done that walk in months as work picked up pace, and I remember that walk clearly. I’d looked up and realized it was the end of autumn and we were heading into winter. I’d missed an entire fall, how could I let that happen? When my partner traveled to Rome for an offsite and asked my kid for what they want, my kid said “picture of clouds”, and that made me so proud. Stopping and taking pause in clouds and sunsets is what we are here for, and the meaning of life is what we make of it, what a loss that I had almost forgotten it myself. I will continue to work the way I work, I will continue to derive meaning from work, but I will not make work my meaning again, that’s for sure. 

The sunset during that walk was heartbreakingly stunning. I took a photo of it as I looked at the sky the way I should with an artist’s eyes for the first time in months. Here’s an oil pastel drawing I made from that photo. I hope my lessons are of help to others who are also forgetting to look at sunsets. 

Finding Community Joy and Understanding With Friends Who May or May Not Wear Masks

For a very long time I could not understand why some of the most brilliant and kind individuals I know stopped wearing masks despite the rampant COVID numbers and the detrimental effect it has on our brain, bodies, and long term health. It has been an isolating journey of self discovery and observation of others, and I would like to share some of my theories, produced from a place of curiosity and zero judgement. The targeted readers of this summary are intellectually honest and curious members of the community, regardless of their mask-wearing behaviour.

Yesterday I found out about another friend in tech who is no longer able to do software engineering work due to long covid, and the subsequent cognitive decline. This adds to the increasing handful of newly disabled professionals within my own community, I imagine others have heard similar cases.

I do not intend to persuade those who stopped wearing masks to begin wearing masks again, that is a personal choice and we should respect everyone’s decisions after receiving data and doing their own processing. The power of being seen without judgement is incredible, and I wish to do my part in beginning to close a gap between the mask-wearing/ maskless communities with this write-up.

Even the smartest and kindest individuals have stopped masking – I believe it is the outcome of a composite of issues all mutually reinforcing each other in complex ways. These may or may not all apply to the reader, I acknowledge there is inaccuracy and incompleteness.

Why Smart and Kind People Stopped Wearing Masks

Global Official Mismanagement of Information

I will spend the least amount of time on this section, as this is something everyone knows. Across the entire western world there have been different levels and formats of obfuscating information dissemination around active COVID numbers and its long term health effects.

This is the outcome of the capitalistic desire to sustain the economy, at the cost of a long-term public health crisis. However – capitalism and governmental policies drive each other in our systems, and oftentimes results are driven by desired quarterly, annual, and election term outcomes.

With the entanglement of health authorities, revenue generating machines, media outlets, and policy making processes at all levels, it is only natural the outcome to be: COVID numbers are not collected/disseminated well, and COVID research outcomes are not disseminated to the public at all.

Acceptance of Risk

Some friends I’ve spoken to have expressed their acceptance of the risk levels. This is something we all do on a day-to-day basis: some of us smoke, some of us drink, some of us go do exciting adrenaline driven activities that bring superior joy at the risk of bodily harm. It is a set of tradeoffs we have internally evaluated and made a choice with various levels of explicit intention, and we all have different needs.

It is ok to accept the risk, but accepting the risk without adequate data could have negative outcomes. Unfortunately, Global Official Mismanagement of Information is resulting in elevated difficulty in passive consumption of information around COVID outcomes: there is elevated risk in detrimental cognitiveco and physical health outcomes even with mild covid infections in young and healthy populations. That information is driven to us via algorithms, and Human Coping Mechanisms for Minimizing Catastrophe prevents many of us from actively seeking out information that could deal damage to our day during an on-going crisis we are attempting to ignore.

Human Coping Mechanisms for Minimizing Catastrophe

Studies of disasters and failure to brace and respond to disasters have produced consistent outcomes around this: we use previous data we collected around similar events to inform our response to a current event, and this is to our detriment when the current event is significantly more impactful.

During the Japanese Tsunami in 2011, many lost their lives as an outcome of miscalculated risk. Many residents had experiences with tsunamis, but never one of this magnitude, yet that experience in responding to smaller tsunamis led to their detriment in evaluations: move to high grounds or higher grounds? Leave now or leave later?

The researcher Reiko Hasegawa described it succinctly: “While risk perception based on former experience did indeed help to save lives of many, in the face of an extreme disaster that exceeded all assumptions in terms of its magnitude, it also produced the reverse effect by creating false assumptions as to the level of risk.”

When we hear “it’s just like a flu” and have anecdotal evidence of ourselves and others getting COVID and recovering from it with minimal effects, it is evidence feeding into our confirmation bias. Due to Global Official Mismanagement of Information, many of us are not aware that even mild COVID infections impact T cells and have an overall impact on all of our physical functions and organs: across all demographic groups, even mild covid reinfections has a significant impact on elevated heart, liver, respiratory, and cognition (1, 2, 3). COVID is to a flu is roughly comparable to the Japanese 2011 Tsunami is to previous smaller, less disastrous tsunamis. COVID and flu share a set of symptoms and behaviours, but the former is vastly different in the mechanisms of infection and its superior ability to evolve and adapt. Using our experiences with influenza to evaluate our responses to COVID may lead to mismanagement of risk, yet it is just an outcome of the way our brain works.

It is my experience that even the most astute, analytical, and intellectual of us are susceptible to the Human Coping Mechanisms to Minimize Catastrophe across all situations of varying degrees of impact. In fact, I do not feel like I have found the best scholarly reserach available to link for this blog due to my own anxiety and desire to think about COVID— we are all susceptible. Without research data actively presented to us by a collection of government and corporate bodies, which are motivated to publicize an alternative reality of “there-is-no-catastrophe” and continue Global Official Mismanagement of Information, no wonder so many of us stopped wearing a mask.

(Faultless) Alienation & Miscommunications from the Mask-wearing Community

I have received casual and hostile remarks from strangers and acquaintances around my mask wearing, which can roughly be categorized into “you think you’re better than us huh” or “you’re living in fear”. The former struck me as a surprise, because I was wearing a mask out of a desire to protect my own health, and I do not assign moral goodness to mask wearing. However, it appears the early pandemic stages of equating mask-wearing with community care has created that perception: “mask wearers are virtual signalers”. It does not help that many of us who are still wearing masks are also coping with the frustration and isolation from our friends and family who are no longer wearing masks, and I have seen social media content criticizing those who have stopped wearing masks.

It is a common human desire to resort to coping mechanisms when we are feeling hurt, isolated, and criticized. Mask wearers have reason to be angry at those who stopped wearing masks, and in feeling judged, those who stopped wearing masks have reason to feel alienated and hence resentment towards mask wearers. In an attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance, those who do not wear masks either quietly distanced themselves from mask wearers, or began to actively criticize them with the reason they have found to be sensible - “they must be wearing masks out of fear”.

In response to a global pandemic, we have divided ourselves in more ways than one. With the political and socioeconomic factors being out of scope for this discussion,the choice to wear a mask and remain COVID cautious has alienated everyone on both sides of the fence, to different degrees, as a result of how the human brain chooses to cope.

Narrative building is a powerful tool to recover from trauma, and the pandemic has traumatized us as a whole. Building a narrative of why masks can be such a point of friction within people who are otherwise aligned in other ways has been helpful for my own mental health, and I am sharing this narrative in hopes of helping others who have found the confusion around not understanding behaviours different from that of our own. I am also hoping to show those who make different choices from myself: you are seen, you are valid, I empathize with your choices and I respect you regardless.

Nihilism

Lastly, I have observed some friends tossing reason out the window. They are astute observers of life who have keenly recognized the awfulness of it all, and they have simply given up and resorted to a “whatever happens happens” mindset, especially since mask-wearing can be so isolating, and there is at least the joy of community gathering and regular daily operations without the construction of a mask in the alternative.

For those who feel nihilistic around the state of our world, I hope reading this gives you some small amount of renewed strength. You are also seen, and your path is also respected and empathized with. I hope you find strength in you to hold good regard for the world again, but I also think it is incredibly poetic and awesome to choose the path of “fuck it, I want to live and enjoy life while I can”.

But Life Has to Go On, What Now?

While this was therapeutic to write, it was also devastating and anxiety-provoking. My brain raced through a series of reactions to this writing from different types of readers, and I feel like a common question for those who made it through the last sections would be: ok, thanks for the narrative, cool story but I’m now depressed and you’re not offering me a solution.

I do not have solutions, but I have some methodologies that have begun to work for me and those in my community, mask-wearers and maskless alike.

More Understanding, Less Isolation

This past summer of 2023 was when I began collecting these thoughts. My best friend of 1.5 decades, who had stopped wearing masks, flew from the other side of the country to stay with me for a week. After discussing our levels of risk evaluation and my reasoning for mask-wearing, he and his partner both chose to social distance and wear masks for 10 days ahead of his flight.

It was the first time we got to see each other face-to-face since 2020, we caught up and had a transformative week of bonding and mutual growth. Two of my local best friends, who also stopped wearing masks early in the pandemic, met up with my best friend, myself, and my child. We did mask-wearing friendly activities, and shared an evening of patio dinner, drinks, icecream, and coffee. I returned home that evening feeling community joy that had been missing from my life for 3 years, and I realized the path to resolution and joy in a terrifying new world is more understanding and communication with those who are otherwise aligned with me.

I am grateful for my friends who have different risk calculations from me for accommodating my need for outdoor activities, and I hope to encourage the readers to have similar discussions with friends you have been missing due to different COVID cautiousness practices. Ultimately, it is all of us and our desire to enjoy community and life again versus the devastating impacts of a virus that is not being managed well by governing systems, and we can talk about how we cope these problems in the format of:

• What are the outdoor activities that we can do together? What are the seasons in our locale that are appropriate for these? How can we plan our social schedules around those constraints?

• How can we make each other feel comfortable in each other’s presence? How can we demonstrate understanding and respect for different choices around COVID caution practices?

• What are the best patios around in the city? How can we better improve indoor ventilation for shared indoor spaces so hanging out again may be achievable?

Harm Reduction and Risk Mitigation

Mask wearing does not completely eliminate COVID risk, respirators make it better, and better mask hygiene further improves that. HEPA filters help too, and better mental health as an outcome of mitigating community division will boost our immune systems.

When it comes to the manifestations of COVID infection, the amount of virus that ends up in our system matters, and the statistical likelihood of being exposed to the virus matters based on Settings. An example of risk mitigation for those who may not wish to wear masks everyday might be having a mask on in high traffic indoor places with poor ventilation, like transit and air ports. Another example of risk mitigation could be placing HEPA filters in office spaces and homes to reduce viral load in the air.

These are my starter pointers. If we come together as a community, I believe we can produce more creative and systemic solutions of risk mitigation.

Protecting Our Collective Intellect

Those of us who are system thinkers realize the significant long term impact of wide-spread cognitive impact across all demographics. This was a dense write-up, readers who have made it to this section are likely intellectually curious folks who have a desire to protect their cognitive capabilities. This is my contribution to the collective facilitation of community joy, understanding, problem solving, and healing from our trauma in a devastating new world ravaged by unmitigated COVID, and also my canary call to the intellectual community who may wish to join me in preventing further crisis.

I have found myself wishing for a write-up like this to aggregate these narratives in a way I could share with my own community. Mine are not unique observations, and many others have probably written or talked about it in different formats, it is likely due to my own ignorance that I have not found one. I am a big fan of “when there isn’t a solution you want, make one” – hopefully this is the beginning of many solutions to be produced by those of you who have found some small joy, strength, and inspiration in having read my analysis.

How to Get Started with Having Hot Pot at Home

Purpose

This doc serves as a shopping list for those who aren’t familiar with having hot pot at home.

Tools needed

• A table-top electric pot (any will do - you can even do a little table top gas stove or electric burner with a regular pot). The key is to have a pot containing the soup base heated throughout dinner. You should be able to adjust the heat up and down too. 

• Hotpot soup ladle 

• Hotpot strainer

• Chopsticks, plates to hold raw materials, plate for each person, dipper plate for reach person

Technique

• Dip food into hotpot quickly then remove once it is cooked. If there are raw meat items in the soup, wait until the soup boils before consuming any content from the soup.

• You can get fancy with any thinly sliced meat items by quickly dipping and holding under soup for 1~3 seconds at a time,and doing it for 7~8 times. 

• Use separate chopsticks for raw and a shared set of chopsticks for getting food from inside the pot. Some people don’t mind this as much, but it’s better to be careful. 

Materials

Listing some of the materials I personally prefer. There are many regional preferences for hotpot. You are free to get creative.

• Hot pot soup base 

• Many people like to make their own too but it’s a lot of effort. Here’s a page that shows the variety. Many flavours are available. If you get a double sided hotpot pot, you can even buy two flavours (one spicy, one not spicy). An example of all the hot pot soup bases: https://www.tntsupermarket.com/chs/product-categories/sauces-pickles/hot-pot-soup-bases.html 

• Hot pot dip (this is very regional and personal preference based too_

• premade types

• Mixing your own: minced garlic, spring onions, cilantro, sesame paste, sesame oil, oyster sauce, light soy sauce, sugar, salt, chili oil, chili, vinegar 

• Meats 

• Thinly sliced lamb

• Thinly sliced beef 

• Shrimp (full)

• Shrimp paste (put spoonfuls in at a time in and fish out once cooked)

• Fish filet

• All types of fish balls 

• Tripes, stomachs, intestines, etc

• Spam

• Liver 

• Blood tofu 

• Veggies

• Any leafy vegetables (there are more variety of these at Asian supermarkets)

• Mushrooms, any type. Best kinds for hotpot are oyster mushrooms, king oyster mushrooms, and enoki mushrooms

• Lotus root, peeled and sliced 

• Potato (am not a fan but some people are)

• All types of tofu products - tofu is great in hotpot!

• Frozen tofu, firm tofu, soft tofu, tofu puffs, tofu skin 

• Seaweed knots 

• Starchy foods: boil these last because they will make your soup starchy and thick

• Vermicelli of all sizes and shapes

• Noodles of any type 

• Konjac noodles (a personal favourite)