I’ll be upfront about something: I hate writing. Always have. So the fact that I’m starting a blog is a little funny to me. But I’ve always wanted to do this, and I’ve learned that “waiting until I feel like it” isn’t a strategy. So here I am.

I’m an engineer who thinks like an architect and teaches on the side. If you want the full story, the about page has it. What matters here is that I spend my days somewhere between building systems, designing them, and explaining them to people who are learning how it all works. And I have a lot of thoughts about all three that don’t fit neatly into a Slack message.

One thing that keeps coming up lately: students asking how I actually got here. Not the resume version. The real version. How do you go from learning this stuff in a classroom to making architectural decisions at scale, to being the person in the room that other people look to? I don’t have a clean answer yet. But it’s a question I think about a lot, and some of what I write here will probably be me trying to work that out.

I’ve also been trying to figure out my place with AI. I think it’s useful, it’s here to stay, and it’s going to change a lot about how we work. But I don’t want to just hand things off to it and lose the skills I’ve been building for years. As an engineer, a teacher, and someone who thinks about systems for a living, that balance feels worth talking about.

Here’s what you can expect from me: posts about engineering and architecture. Scaling systems, making hard design decisions, the stuff that gets interesting at real volume. Posts about teaching and what it’s like to move between both worlds. Career stuff too. How I think about growth, what I’ve learned, and honest answers to the questions my students keep asking me. And occasionally something about video games, because that’s how I decompress and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

If any of that sounds interesting, stick around. And if not? Honestly, this is mostly me thinking out loud anyway.