Hello, World

Hello, World! And welcome to my very first post. It's almost a right-of-passage as someone working in the technology industry to stand up a site for their portfolio or blog of their musings. And so, after many years of procrastinating, here's mine. Hope you enjoy!

What will you write about?

I expect most of my content will center around the tech industry and my role as an engineering manager. In my career in the tech industry there's never been a shortage topics from AI to z-index. And, working as an engineering management role since 2020, I've grown fascinated with all the different facets to the job: leadership, strategy, technical knowledge, performance management, communication, and so many more. Between my role and the industry at large there are so many topics with that are worth reflecting on and writing about!

If you have a suggestion for a topic you're particularly interested in hearing my thoughts on, send me a note on LinkedIn.

Why now?

The past few years I've found myself enjoying activities that I didn't always find rewarding in the past. Cooking, home improvement projects, etc. were all more interesting to me than ever before -- particularly when some improvisation was required to overcome missing ingredients or learn a new technique. I've realized a commonality between these activities was the creative outlet they provided and I've self-diagnosed that I was in need of creative outlets to pair with my other hobbies like basketball or snowboarding.

This revelation also got me thinking about how much of my time I spend consuming vs. creating. As a working professional I spend a lot of my time creating presentations, writing proposals, establishing new processes, etc. during working hours my day job. In my free time, on the other hand, I've realized just how much of my time I spend consuming content. Whether it's reading articles online, reading books, listening to music, watching something on Netflix, I spend the majority of my free time consuming different forms of media. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with this -- these are activities that I find enjoyment from -- but I truly believe life is about balance and by spending more time creating I think I can reach a better balance for myself.

As a third piece to the puzzle, after several years working in technology I'd like to cement some of my learnings and pass them on to others. I've believed in the importance of teaching something to someone else as the final step in learning. I hope some of my learnings along my journey to perfect my craft may be useful to someone else.

At the intersection of these ideas, I realized a personal blog reflecting on some of my experiences might be the perfect solution. As a resolution this year, I've set out to devote more of my free time to creating via this blog. Some of the hobbies I mentioned above occasionally resulted in some unfinished projects around our place in San Francisco when I've gotten distracted by a different creative hobby (sorry Melissa!), but I'm sure this one will be different (I hope this ages well 🤞).

Did you build this site yourself?

I did! While it might have been easier just to leverage and existing blogging platform like Medium or a WYSIWYG platform to build a website, in the spirit of creating, I decided to build the site myself. It also turned out to be a fun opportunity to dust off my coding skills after spending several years a step removed from programming as an engineering manager. The site is built with next.js and hosted via Vercel - maybe I'll publish a blog post on it in the future!