Why now?

I’m a daily reader of Hacker News, and many of the blogs that frequent its first page, I’ve never really written myself before, outside of technical documentation. For my entire career I’ve figured that I don’t have much to add, nothing new to write that hasn’t been written before. I still mostly feel that way as I’m writing this now.

So why start a blog now? I’m not totally sure, but the motivation appeared as I was making the decision to leave my fourth “real” job, which also happened to be my first step out of the IC path and into a more formal leadership / management role.

I suppose the logic is that if I’ve made it this far, maybe I’m doing a couple of things right, and lately I have been feeling the urge to share what I feel is a less-prominent perspective on software engineering as a career, at least compared to what typically makes it to the top of Hacker News.

Some themes I will be focusing on

There’s a massive divide between idealism and reality in this job, and it is an extension of the way social media affects millions of peoples’ self image. In college I saw the potential to find that golden nugget like we saw the Zucks and Spiegels do while growing up, just as I envied the physical looks of models and actors. In both domains, some of us (not as much as I’d have hoped) grew up and started to see more of the hollow, often grim reality behind these shiny facades.

On the other hand, for many people with similar values as me, there’s the obvious priviliged side of being a technologist: it affords us a comfortable lifestyle whilst so many around us struggle and suffer, and all the while we see (if we are willing to see it) the negative impacts of the American tech industry on the world around us - mentally, financially, and environmentally.

If you’re like me, severe guilt creeps in. There’s ways to cope with that guilt: “the more successful I get, the more I’ll be able to give back philanthropically.” “Maybe, becoming financially independent will allow me to start that great non-profit idea I’ve been sitting on for years!” - so says the same person who has finished 2% of all side projects started. I have a lot of thoughts on this aspect of tech bro guilt, but I don’t want to dive in too deep on any one topic in this first post yet.

Goals for this blog

I don’t plan on doing any real promotion of this blog. I won’t be posting it on my Linkedin, a community that I have come to despise. I won’t make any active SEO efforts beyond whatever comes for free with Astro. I’m not even certain if I’d mention it to people I know in real life, at least not unless something comes up in conversation which I could refer someone to a post about.

For the most part this is just for me, a place to keep a public facing journal of my thoughts, reflections, and criticisms about the tech industry.

If I ever use AI to assist in writing a blog post, it will be called out explicitly at the top. I won’t be using any non-solar energy to host it (beyond something like Cloudflare Tunnel, which is afaik unavoidable with my current ISP). To be clear, that last bit is more of a fun challenge for myself than any sort of judgement on using traditional cloud hosting.