Yesterday was my last day at Google and the Chrome team. In fact, I have retired.

Over the last 11 years, I’ve worked to improve the web platform, focusing on foundational features where my skills in web standards and API design could make a difference. From my earliest work on promises to my latest work on built-in AI and speculative loading, I’ve tried to push the web forward, taking seriously the responsibility of designing a billion-user platform.

Along the way I’ve worked with many amazing people, both inside and outside Google. I’m especially grateful to my mentors and managers in Chrome who nurtured my development. Google let me work independently from the New York City office as an L4, despite there being no web platform team in NYC. I was always free to choose my own projects, often spontaneously forming 2–4-person geo-distributed teams. And when I wanted to move to Tokyo, my directors made it happen, letting me spend the last 3 years as part of the Tokyo Chrome team on larger-scale efforts.

Over this time, evolving the web has grown more complex. It’s hard to tell how much of this is due to the evolution of Google and the macroeconomic environment—is platform-building a ZIRP phenomenon?—versus how much is just me seeing the larger picture, as I advanced to L7 and became more attuned to business impact. Early on, I worked on custom elements or JavaScript modules because I thought they were obvious platform gaps. Whereas recently the job became about winning the argument first: lining up stakeholders, persuading directors, and rallying ICs in order to make speculative loading ready for broad | ecosystem | adoption, not just for use on Google Search. But I have no regrets or resentment in this regard. Just like I was thrilled to learn after university that people will pay well for something as fun as programming, I’m amazed that we’ve managed to harness the will of the market and large corporate budgets to nurture an artifact as impressive as the web.

Moving on

This would normally be the point where I announce my next exciting adventure. Or I could quietly fade out, perhaps discussing a sabbatical or mysterious “projects”. But I’ve decided to embrace a different approach: I’m retired! I no longer need to work for money, and I’m going to take on the responsibility of figuring out what that looks like.

It’s somewhat scary, leaving my career behind. I worry about the projects I didn’t quite complete, or the organizations I was a core part of that will now move on without me. I’m sad to miss the opportunity to watch and assist with the growth of the junior engineers who have joined Chrome Tokyo over the last few years. I think we’ve reduced the bus factor enough that everything will be fine, but of course the future won’t go exactly as I would have steered it. That’s OK; it rarely did anyway.

I also worry about fading into obscurity, as I refocus on personal projects and my work becomes less visible and less influential. There’s a fundamental tension between the freedom to focus on your self-directed interests, and the fact that nobody cares about them as much as you do. But I’ve spent many years prioritizing impact on the world, and am excited to shift some of my priorities toward what most excites and invigorates me personally.

Life after work

While I was working, a typical weekday would have me home from the office by 19:30, studying Japanese until 21:00, and ending with an hour of free time before bed. Weekends were precious but rare, and often taken up by errands.

Meanwhile, my backlog of side-project ideas, books to read, and self-improvement quests grew. I moved to Tokyo over 3 years ago, and am eagerly looking forward to spending more time exploring all it has to offer. The AI coding revolution is in full swing, but at work I could only use Gemini CLI, which isn’t very good. I spent a week on a meditation retreat last year, but after a month of trying to carve out a 30-minute daily habit, I had to admit defeat: my work performance and Japanese recall were suffering from getting 30 minutes less sleep.

Life has so much to offer, and I’m excited to live it more fully. I’ll be raising a puppy, seriously increasing my Japanese study time, and enjoying my backlog of video games, TV series, and novels. I’ll build small apps for myself to scratch an itch or learn a technology, and then decide whether to try polishing and publishing them. More than anything, I plan to learn a lot: I want to deep-dive into the philosophy of computation, personal identity, and consciousness; I want to resume my studies of theoretical physics in general, and quantum gravity in particular; I want to learn Lean and get involved in modern, often AI-assisted attempts to formalize mathematics. I’ll make new friends, start new hobbies, and travel to new places. I’m so excited.