I've started road cycling a few months ago. My dad used to ride, and I remember always envying the whole ritual of it. I also was a kid that was on the bike a lot, so it just made sense to acquire another adulthood hobby myself.

Bicycles are fairly simple yet beutiful machines. There are lots of things to learn, and riding my bike without understanding these was bothering me a little bit. I got my first two bikes on Marketplace, gradually getting nicer ones. After a few months on the bike, I was ready to make it my entire personality, and I came across this bike frame.

Paint job was beautiful, and the frame is made of aluiminum which makes it a lot more durable and affordable than carbon fiber. For my fellow nerds, it's a 2025 Specialized Allez Sprint in Satin Sea Foam.

This bike is only sold as a standalone frame, which means one needs to get all the remaining parts and put it all together. Or pay your local bike shop to do it.

Anyways, enough nerding out about the bike itself. I want to talk about the journey itself.

The planning

As an engineer, planning is something I do a lot in my day to day. I think being an immigrant also makes you a good planner. So learning about the parts and the processes of assembling a bike on YouTube was a fairly easy part of the prep. The more difficult part was finding people on Marketplace and good deals without getting scammed. 😀

The most difficult part was to embark on the challenge itself.

I've realized I love getting things done at my job. Navigating a codebase easily, investigating a bug, fixing it, these are very satisfying things, and makes you feel very good about yourself. But the only way to be good at this is to struggle for hours on it before getting better. But knowing this mindset doesn't mean you'll be able to apply it anywhere in life. Being completely out of your domain, is a very different challenge. In your domain, you have peers, tools and the intuition to try different things out, isolate issues and have progress. Outside of your domain, all of these resources are unavailable. And it's a lot more likely to get into a negative feedback loop.

The execution

The first task of building a bike is routing the internal cabling through the frame, which doesn't seem complex but believe me is the worst part of the entire job. Even worse than bleeding your hydraulic brakes. Having the most difficult part of the job as the first task really doesn't help, and easily leads you to doubt yourself and drops your excitement down the drain. For me, sleeping on it was the the answer. Next morning, with a fresh mind, I did more research and saw some tricks that helped me to get the job done. I was trying to route them from the wrong side. Instead of starting from the rear side of the bike, I routed it from near the fork.

It really puts a bitter smile on your face when you advise other people on life things, and when you're struggling with something similar it becomes so difficult to remember the things you said to others and keep your calm.

Everybody doubts themselves, best engineers, founders, gurus, mentors.. Some people are just better at not listening to themselves when self doubt happens. I was able to keep it cool for the most part, good for me.

We're so back

Upside of starting with the most difficult part of the job is that, it hypes you up for the rest of the job. And gives you the overconfidence we all ocassionally need to push through. Sometimes things need to get worse before they get better.

Not going to get into too much of the rest of the job, but this picture will show you how chaotic it got at one point.

Takeaways

Go to your local bike shop and show some respect for the mechanics there, those guys are literal artists. Biggest takeaway for me from this process is, I'm probably not building another bike anytime soon. It feels amazing and rewarding, but it's hella difficult.

Keep challenging yourself, even if you're good at something, don't pigeonhole yourself into just doing that. Being cross disciplined makes us interesting people, and that's important to build a balanced and all-around life. This is how you become a good citizen, parent, coworker and a neighbor. So don't give up on yourself.

Cheers, and say Hi if you see me on the road around the Bay. 🥂