Starting Fresh: Why I'm Writing Now
Five years at Amazon, a side project almost ready to ship, and a decision to finally start writing. Here's why.
I've been meaning to start a blog for years. Not in a vague, someday-I-should way — I've actually opened text editors, stared at blank pages, and closed them again more times than I care to admit.
So why now?
The honest answer
I'm building something. Beemoot has been my side project for a while now, and it's getting close to the point where I need to put it in front of real people. That transition — from building in the dark to building in public — is one I've been thinking about a lot.
Writing feels like the right way to process it.
There's something I've noticed about engineers who build things that last: they tend to think in public. Not performatively — not the "I built X in Y days" type of content — but genuinely working through problems in writing. It clarifies thinking in a way that's hard to replicate.
What I'll write about
A few threads I'm planning to pull on:
The Beemoot launch. I want to document the experience of taking a side project from "almost done" to "people are actually using this." The decisions, the mistakes, what surprised me. If it fails, that's worth writing about. If it doesn't, that's worth writing about too.
Engineering at Amazon. Five years of building distributed systems at scale has taught me a lot about how to think about reliability, operational excellence, and writing code that other people will have to maintain at 3am. Some of that knowledge is worth putting down.
Whatever else I'm working through. Compilers, signal processing, neural networks — I have a long history of getting interested in things and going deep. That hasn't changed.
What this isn't
This isn't a content strategy. I'm not building an audience. I'm not SEO-optimizing anything. These are my workshop notes, written for myself first and anyone else second.
If you find it useful, great. If not, that's fine too.
Let's see where this goes.