Hello! My name is Ryan Berger, I’m a 24-year-old software developer living in Seattle, WA. This is the first real post of my blog, and oh boy is it a doozy!
To cut it short: in the coming months, I will be undergoing a bilateral lung transplant at the University of Washington.
I have—since I was 13—known this was coming, but my lung function and blood tests show that I am not too far off from respiratory failure. My doctors have determined that I am in good shape and it is now time.
If you know me superficially, you probably would not have guessed my condition. I currently work a full-time job at a large software company. I work on compilers and compiler tooling! I have a normal-ish social life. I play chess at local chess nights, go to concerts (although masked), and visit the art museums.
Lung transplants are no joke, especially mine. Although small, there is a chance that I won’t make it or will end up fully disabled. I wouldn’t take this option if I didn’t think it would give me a better quality of life than I had before.
Because of this chance, I wanted to write a short post about the things that I’ve done that I’m proud of. I’m trying to make sure this isn’t me memorializing myself because I plan on getting out of this okay, so I’ll leave a sneak peek of what I plan on doing once my lungs are no longer diseased
Things I’m Proud Of
First Coding Job
Although Bryan Cantrill’s talk heavily applies here, I’m extremely happy that I was able to quickly learn programming between the ages of 12-15, enough that when I was 16 (working legal age in the US) that I was able to apply for a job at a local DevShop. I initially started out as a mentee through a local middle school program, and it slowly evolved into a job.
My mentors there set me on the right track and taught me invaluable software development skills that they had learned from being the launchpad for many startups around Utah. Ahead of my peers, I knew to ship early and often, how and when to start optimizing, software architecture skills, and how to work in a team.
Eagle Scout
Growing up in Utah, a majority of young men between the ages of 12 and 18 are Eagle Scouts, which requires a form of a capstone, an “Eagle Scout Project”. At least in my area, many of these projects are wholly carried out by the parents of the kids. These generally barely check the boxes by doing something such as organizing a blood drive (calling the Red Cross), or food drive (setting up a food donation spot on their porch).
I decided that I didn’t want my project to be like that. Due to extensive time in the hospital, my family and I have stayed at the Ronald McDonald house, a charity that provides housing to families who need housing and community while their child is in the hospital. I visited the Ronald McDonald House of Salt Lake City and noticed their computer lab was lacking.
With kettle corn supplies donated by my parents, my troop and I popped many thousands of dollars worth of popcorn in an industrial kettle corn popper. I organized multiple sales outside of grocery markets and farmer’s markets. In the end we sold enough to donate 30 Chromebooks to the Ronald McDonald house. With the leftover money, we were able to also provide the house with a meal. I am very proud of my 15-year-old self who noticed a community need and fulfilled it.
Señor Wooly
Señor Wooly is one of my greatest engineering achievements. At 19, I was a broke college student who was looking for a one-off side gig to make extra cash. I went on UpWork and found a familiar face: Sr. Wooly, the Spanish language learning program I used in junior high. After an interview, Jim Wooldridge (Sr. Wooly himself) decided to give me a chance because I was a) an Eagle Scout and b) I used Sr. Wooly in junior high.
After a full summer of work, I rolled out a new and revamped Teacher site. It was FLASHY. It had a statistics dashboard to make grading easy and tons of new teacher management features. Because of the roaring success, Jim had come to trust my instinct, and we were off to the races with tons of new features and hosting improvements. Soon it had been 4 years and the level of on-call and Everything Man work that I had to do was too much for me.
It has been interesting to look back on that experience as I believe it took me from a junior engineer to a senior engineer over 4 to 5 years. It gave me tons of experience requirement gathering from non-technical folks and interfacing with the school district IT staff. It was also a harsh test of my decision-making skills as whatever technical decisions I made, I was stuck with, and had to see first hand how it decisions played out.
Graduating College
College for the first 2.5 years was extremely easy for me due to my programming experience. The last 1.5 I really pushed myself and got into distributed systems with Raft thanks to Ryan Stutsman. I took a graduate-level operating systems course, along with a compiler course both taught by John Regehr.
For my senior capstone, I then worked on ARM-TV with John. It is an ARM lifter that attempts to lift ARM code back into LLVM IR in a semantics preserving way. Before the project was taken over by a few of my fellow students as I was on the way out the door, it found a couple of bugs from global-isel in the backend! ARM-TV was probably the coolest engineering project I’ve worked on, and it got me my current job.
I think without pushing myself to the next level of developer and pushing through the numerous hard classes I wouldn’t be the developer (or person!) I am today. Cruising through high school and college uncritically was extremely detrimental to me, and it was good to finally be required to work hard to achieve my aims.
Pushing through and getting through college with only a couple lung collapses is something I am extremely proud of. I could not do the same now.
Getting a Compiler Job
Although it wasn’t my first job out of college, I ended up landing a job doing work in the doing programming language field at $BIG_CORP. After doing a lot of generic software development (i.e., frontend/backend/db stack) I was wanting a bit more out of my work, and I wanted to do something “meaningful.” Building Yet Another CRUD Site for something that Probably Doesn’t Need an App doesn’t scream meaningful to me.
Even with my current health issues, I was able to scrape the energy to study extremely hard outside my 9-5 to be involved in outside research and to do interview prep. I was able to stabilize my health enough that I felt comfortable making the jump into PL research, and I did!
Getting a more meaningful job is something that I am extremely proud of.
Gaining Weight
For most of my life, I was a whopping 94/95lbs (43kg for the enlightened) at 5'7" (170cm). My lungs work 2-4 times harder than the normal person which requires a serious “eat anything you can” lifestyle. It also didn’t help that my dad was pretty small as a kid as well. As I got closer to transplant, it became a problem. I was told that there would be no option for a lung transplant if I didn’t get my weight up.
A bit over a year ago I decided enough was enough and that even if it took getting a feeding tube I’d become a normal weight. I saw 130lbs (~60kg) as an unachievable mountain that could never be summited. However, after getting a permanent feeding (PEG) tube placed and pushing myself to eat more and more, I eventually gained 35 pounds in a year!
NSFW: shirt-off progress picture
Keeping Active
One reason many people don’t realize that I’m disabled is because of how active I have been. As a Boy Scout, I had the choice of either the swimming or biking merit badge. I chose biking and although my lung function was in the high 40s, I finished the required 50-mile ride with my mom in about 4 hours.
I hiked to the Delicate Arch and Angel’s Landing with my lung function in the low 40s, walked around my college campus, and after a COVID infection and hitting the 30s, I started pulmonary rehab. I was running 12-minute miles when my lung function was in the 30s and lifting weights, netting me an extra 15 pounds (although those were short-lived).
Even now with my lung function in the low 20s, I walk the hills in Seattle. I walk slower than a 90-year-old, but I do it. I make it a priority to get out every day and walk the hill. I am very proud of this fact as many of my doctors are pretty shocked that I’m still able and expect that this will make my recovery from transplant much easier than a majority of other patients.
For the Future
With all that out of the way, what do I plan on doing after a lung transplant?
Well, this is dependent on a lot of things, so I have been making sure to make goals for all different levels of ability, but for now I’ll assume that I have a better-functioning body than I do currently.
Travel
As a child I went to London for a Make-a-Wish. It was lovely, I had a ton of fun. I’d like to take a skip across the channel into Europe and travel everywhere a train can take me. Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Turkey just as much as I can. Try out all the local cuisines, get to know interesting people, and who knows! Maybe I’ll end up staying in one.
I also want to travel to Asia. I do have to be a bit more cautious and stay close to countries that could handle my medical care, so I currently have Japan, China, South Korea, and Vietnam that I’m interested in visiting.
Learning
I’m a big learner. I want to constantly be learning. I’ve very much considered going and getting a PhD, but research is for sure on my horizon. I see a PhD as a time to work on something risky, something that may not initially or immediately be useful or turn a profit. Should industry not make any more sense, I will definitely go back to school. Having been in industry and also having done work with John, I prefer that if I write a tool or do research that it be useful and be maintained instead of thrown away after a paper. (See CSmith and Alive/Alive2 as great examples of this.)
Move a Lot
I currently live in Seattle and moved here for healthcare reasons. Utah’s healthcare is better than completely rural medicine, but it is still struggling to catch up to larger states such as Washington or California’s. Once healthcare isn’t so much of a consideration, I want to try out new places! New York, Boston, SF, or maybe abroad!
Get a Pet
When my health outcomes weren’t very clear, my parents decided a small creature would help out with my anxiety and give me company. They had been insistent on no pets for most of my life, but decided to make an exception for Emi, our 8-year-old Sesame Shiba Inu. The idea was that once I graduated from college, I could take her in as mine. Because I can’t keep up with her walking needs, and because the entire family fell in love with her, she has remained at my parents'.
With a new lease on life, I’d love to get my own dog. A shiba is a strong choice for me as I enjoy their loyal personality, but I’m open.
Here’s Emi, bugged that I exist, and that I do in fact want to pet her:
Use My Lungs a Lot
When I was in middle school, I ran cross-country, in high school I used a bike to get around. In college (and even now) I walk most places. With a new pair of lungs, I want to take that all to a new level. I want to start running again and see if I can run the New York City Marathon with my friends and family. I’d love to hike some really tall, high-elevation mountains such as King’s Peak or Mt. Timpanogos. I’d like to ride a “Century” or 100 mile bike ride. I’d like to start using a bike as my main transportation method. I will be on medication that makes me feel like I’m starving, so if I am going to be eating like an ultra-runner, I want to exercise like one. Weight lifting and getting my muscle mass up will be my priority after transplant, and I’m shooting for 150 or 160lbs (68–72 kg)
To Conclude
While I’ve been waiting for the call, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time programming and reading at my favorite cafe, Espresso Vivace. In many ways it feels as though I’m on the edge of the universe, the outside looking in, just waiting to see if my fate contains a life inside it or outside it. It’s scary! But by next year at this time I should be nearly recovered and be living life fairly normally. I’m confident in my recovery ability and my team, and my family, and I’m excited for a new future!