Why I'm starting to write this down

I spent four years at Menlo Security. I joined as an intern and left as a Senior Engineer, which means I learned the craft inside one codebase — deeply, but narrowly. You pick up an enormous amount that way. You also pick up habits you cannot see, because you have never worked anywhere that does it differently.

Then I moved to Acceldata. Different pace, different domain, and a set of assumptions I did not know I was carrying until they stopped being true.

The thing that pushed me to write

Four years of production work teaches you a lot — but by osmosis. You learn networking because a tunnel misbehaved. You learn observability because something failed and nobody could see why. The knowledge is real, but it is shaped like a list of incidents rather than a set of principles, and you cannot reliably apply it to a problem you have not already been burned by.

Changing teams made the gaps obvious. Not gaps in what I had done, but in what I could explain. There is a specific, uncomfortable feeling in realizing you have used a thing successfully for years and cannot articulate why it works.

Writing is the fix. It is much harder to fool yourself in prose than in your own head.

What this is going to be

Notes on systems, networking, and observability. Mental models from DSA — the patterns, not the problem numbers. Write-ups of problems I have actually hit, while the details are still sharp. And occasionally the non-technical parts of this job: the transitions, the tradeoffs, the things that turn out to matter more than the tech stack.

What it isn’t

Polished takes with a thesis I picked in advance. If a post changes its mind halfway through, that is the process showing, not something I forgot to edit out. I would rather publish something honest and be corrected than publish something safe and learn nothing.

More soon.