Eight Years of Silence

It’s been eight years since I last wrote here. That’s a long time to be quiet.

I’ve thought about what to say in a “comeback” post. Should I apologize? Explain? Pretend nothing happened? None of those felt right. So instead, I’ll just tell you what actually happened.

The Disappearance

In 2018, I joined big tech. I stopped writing. That’s it. It wasn’t dramatic. I didn’t burn out or rage quit blogging. I just stopped. The things I was learning felt too company-specific to share. The problems I was solving belonged to my employer. And honestly, I was drinking from a firehose. There was no bandwidth left for public reflection.

That’s okay. I’ve made peace with it.

The Shame of Being Public

But if I’m being really honest, there was something else going on too.

I was ashamed. Not of the work itself, but of putting myself out there. I cared way too much about what people might think. What if my takes were wrong? What if someone from work saw it? What if I looked stupid?

There’s this weird thing that happens when you stay quiet for long enough. You start believing that asking for help is weakness. That showing uncertainty is failure. That the only acceptable version of yourself is the one that already has everything figured out.

I don’t know when I started believing that. But somewhere along the way, I did.

The Pendulum

Somewhere along the way, I also became an engineering manager. This was the harder transition to make sense of. There’s this piece by Charity Majors called https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum that finally gave me language for what I’d been experiencing. The core insight is that management isn’t a promotion. It’s a career change. And the best leaders are the ones who swing back and forth. Building, then managing, then building again.

What I’ve learned is that being an engineering manager isn’t about “managing people.” That framing has always felt incomplete to me. It’s really about being a tech lead with people skills. It’s about gathering humans to finish a project together. It’s about understanding the business domain deeply enough to make the right technical tradeoffs. The skills compound. Time spent as an IC makes you a better manager. Time spent managing makes you a better IC. The pendulum isn’t a step backward. It’s forward momentum in a different direction.

Still Falling Behind

Here’s the thing though. Even after years of learning finance, diving into AI and LLMs, building infrastructure at scale, I still felt empty. I still felt like I was falling behind.

Everyone around me seemed to be moving. New jobs. New titles. New companies. LinkedIn became a highlight reel of promotions and “excited to announce” posts. Meanwhile, I was at the same company, doing what felt like variations of the same work.

The comparison trap is real. It measures your career against everyone else’s curated narrative. And it’s exhausting.

Finding a Different Kind of Community

What actually helped was finding Substack.

I know that sounds like I’m about to pitch you something, but I’m not. What I found there was genuinely life-changing, and it wasn’t the platform itself. It was the community.

People on Substack build shamelessly. They share half-formed ideas. They write about failures. They ask for help without apologizing for it. The vibe is completely different from Reddit or Blind or X, where everyone seems to be tearing each other down. On Substack, people lift each other up when they’re struggling.

That was new for me. I didn’t know communities like that existed online anymore.

Building Again

The other thing that changed was AI. It made building fun again.

I’m not saying this as hype. I’m saying it as someone who just migrated an entire blog from Octopress to modern Jekyll with essentially one prompt. Something that would have taken me a weekend of yak-shaving, searching Stack Overflow, debugging Ruby version conflicts, fixing broken gems, took an afternoon.

The friction is gone. When I want to code something now, I just code it. I open Claude Code and start building. The iteration loop is so much tighter. The activation energy to start a project dropped from “do I really want to spend my Saturday on this?” to “let me just try it.”

This is the first time in years I’ve felt genuinely excited about side projects. Not because AI writes perfect code. It doesn’t. But because the bottleneck shifted. It’s no longer about remembering syntax or searching for the right library. It’s about knowing what you want to build.

What I Actually Learned

Looking back, I wasn’t stuck. I was deepening. There’s a difference between stagnation and mastery. Sometimes staying in place means going deeper instead of wider. Sometimes the growth isn’t visible on a resume.

And sometimes, the pendulum is just gathering momentum for the next swing.

What’s Next

I don’t know exactly what this blog becomes now. I’m not going to promise a posting schedule or commit to a content strategy. That’s not how I work.

But I’m building again. I’m thinking out loud again. And I’m trying to care a little less about what people think.

After eight years of silence, that feels like enough.

Let’s see where it goes.