Hi everyone, welcome to my blog.

I’ve been writing software for what feels like a long time now, and I’ve learned a ton over the years. When I first became a software engineer, I assumed that most of my growth would come from my day job. I quickly discovered that wasn’t going to be enough. If I really wanted to be the best engineer I could be, I’d need to put in time outside of work too.

So I started reading books about programming topics that interested me. In the four years after college, I read more textbooks than I read during the four years I was in college. I also worked on a myriad of side projects, each one combining a problem I wanted to solve (or an idea I wanted to bring to life) with a language or framework I wanted to learn. I’ve always been far more effective at learning something new when I already have an idea of what I want to build with it.

Naturally, the side projects led me to read more books, and the books led me to start more side projects. I don’t think I ever set a completion goal for any of them. Usually there was some question along the lines of “I wonder if X is even possible,” and once I’d figured out that it was and shown it to my colleagues, I’d move on to the next one.

There have been countless times where experience from work made my side projects better, and times where experience from side projects made my real work better. It’s always fun to see these things intersect — at times it felt like a sitcom where two seemingly unrelated storylines run in parallel, and you have no idea how they’ll resolve, but they end up crossing paths at the end of the episode to tie the whole plot into a neat little bow. Always satisfying.

So much of my success in these endeavors has been thanks to blog posts and resources created by others. To that end, I’ve created this blog so I can put some of my own experience out into the void known as the Internet, in the hopes that it might be useful to someone — whether they read it directly or just benefit from it vicariously through an AI that happens to consume it.