Hi! 👋
My name is Lev. I live in Emeryville and work in the tech industry. I am passionate about building teams and helping people solve complex business problems. I'm currently working at Foxglove building the observability stack for the world's largest robotics companies.
Outside of work I enjoy cooking, eating, chess, reading, writing, music, peloton, traveling, and public transit. I spend a little bit of time every day studying Chinese. I am surrounded by great friends and a wonderful family. I am traveling on a journey through space and time with Aosheng, who is a brilliant designer and my favorite person in the world.
Recent Posts
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Coming out to Grandma
Feeling really touched today after reading a letter that Corry Frydlewicz wrote coming out to her grandma:
https://corryfrydlewicz.com/dear-grandma/
By the time I came around to coming out to my grandpa a few year ago my grandma already had dementia and was no longer able to have a meaningful conversation with me. I have no idea why I waited so long. My grandparents were proud of me and supported me my entire life and whatever toxic fantasy I came up on my own mind about how they would react never came to pass. I told my grandpa I was happy, in love, and not going to spend my life being alone. Maybe he didn’t fully understand but he was happy for me, and he finally stopped trying to connect me with single women he knew or ask me when I was getting married.
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Simply More by Cynthia Erivo
I love Cynthia Erivo. When I saw her singing “The Wizard and I” at the AMC IMAX in San Francisco last November I felt like I saw Elpheba herself for the very first time. I sat there bawling in my seat remembering the countless times I would listen to Idina Menzel on the original soundtrack sing that song. Back when I also felt like an outsider with big dreams. I told Aosheng after we saw “Wicked: For Good” a few weeks ago that Ariana Grande did a good job playing Glinda, but Cynthia Erivo is Elpheba.
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Great Lakes, Illinois
I must have looked so desperate on the evening of December 11, 2006 when I asked the woman standing outside in the freezing cold at O’Hare airport for a cigarette. “Excuse me, can I please bum a smoke? I am going to boot camp today and this will be my last one for a while.”
“Here, have two” she said, handing me some Pall Malls and going back to shivering.
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Are we inside a Sarlacc?
The other day my friend Nathan told me about what a Sarlacc is. I’ve never really been into Star Wars but this specific thing stuck with me. The idea is that a Sarlacc is this creature that lives in the desert that looks like a big hole with teeth. If you find yourself inside, you are slowly digested over a thousand years.
C-3PO: “In its belly, you will find a new definition of pain and suffering, as you are slowly digested over a thousand years.”
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Vagrant Box for ROS2 on Apple Silicon
I’ve been knee deep in studying robotics ever since joining Foxglove earlier this month. There is so much to learn! One major pain point that I have come across is trying to work with ROS outside of Linux. I have my Framework Laptop running Ubuntu and that is all working without any issues. But my main work computer is an Apple Silicon Macbook Pro and things are complicated.
Apple Silicon has been the best thing to happen to Apple laptops in my lifetime. The performance and battery life are unreal. However it has made working with Linux VMs and compiling stuff for x86 a huge pain. ROS works best on Linux, but Ubuntu is only recently making it easy to install and run ARM based desktop Linux. Before Apple Silicon I remember running Vagrant and Virtualbox without any issues, but ever since switching over to Apple Silicon Virtualbox feels completely unusable to me, especially when it comes to doing basic things that require guest additions.