There’s a particular kind of irony in being a software engineer who has never had a personal website.
I’ve spent the better part of a decade building systems for other people — financial indices at Bloomberg, data pipelines at FactSet, loyalty platforms at Vodafone — and yet the idea of building something for myself, something visible, something that said here I am and here is what I do, always seemed like a project for later. Later, it turns out, has a way of never arriving on its own.
So this is me deciding to go and fetch it.
The resolve this year is a simple one: to put myself out there a bit more. To build things in the open. To write about the work — not just do the work and move on. To document the journey rather than just accumulate the miles.
This is harder than it sounds, at least for me. There’s a brand of engineer — I suspect you know the type, I have certainly been the type — who is perfectly comfortable doing interesting things while remaining almost entirely invisible. “The work speaks for itself”, the thinking goes.
The work, it turns out, cannot speak at all if nobody knows it exists.
I gave a talk at Black Tech Fest in 2024. I’ve mentored engineers. I’ve led teams. I can, apparently, show up when the occasion is clearly defined and someone else has scheduled it. What I have not done is create the occasion myself, on my own terms, and simply begin.
So this is it, I suppose. The beginning.
There are, of course, the objections. The internal committee that convenes whenever someone considers doing something publicly has already filed its report, and it is thorough.
First objection: everything worth saying has already been said, and said better, by someone with more time and a tidier desk. Almost certainly true. Also, on reflection, beside the point. It may well have been written before. I haven’t written it. That distinction turns out to matter more than the committee anticipated.
Second objection: what if you start and then just quietly stop? What if the posts get sparse, the gaps widen, and the whole thing fades out like an unloved houseplant? Genuinely possible. I’m not promising regularity. I’m not promising anything, really — other than that I’m figuring this out at exactly the same pace you are, and I thought that was only fair to say upfront.
The committee was overruled.
I’m not entirely sure what this space will become. There will be engineering writing — I have thoughts about software design, about working in finance tech, about what it actually means to build things that scale. There will probably be some photography too, though that lives in its own corner of this site. There may be the occasional detour.
What I can promise is that it will be honest, and it will be mine.
Hello, world. It’s good to finally be here.