I started this blog in 2012. I posted for a few years, then convinced myself nobody was reading it. In 2019, I quietly turned the whole thing into a landing page and even stepped away from social media.

I told myself, and everyone else, that I was too busy. That was partly true. But mostly, I didn’t think anyone would care what I was working on or what I thought about it.

Here’s what I was working on while I was busy not writing about it.

In 2012, I started as a consultant at NutritionFacts.org, a nonprofit founded by Michael Greger, M.D. FACLM, to provide free, evidence-based nutrition information through his short, bite-sized videos. In 2015, I became the first employee, as CTO. Since then, we’ve grown from a small video site with seed money from The Jesse and Julie Rasch Foundation into an organization with thousands of videos, a Daily Dozen app, several New York Times bestselling books, and over a million YouTube subscribers.

I built the things that made that possible: infrastructure, tools, workflows, systems. Interesting problems, with real constraints. A nonprofit budget, a very small team, and none of the room for technical debt that bigger organizations get to have. I didn’t write about any of it.

And that was incredibly stupid.

Not end-of-the-world stupid, because the work got done regardless. It had to. But there’s a specific kind of stupid in spending almost thirty years building things at NutritionFacts.org and elsewhere, only to decide none of it was worth documenting. I told myself nobody would care, and I believed it. (Truth be told, as much as I love the internet, I’m still an introvert here, no matter how hard I try not to be.) I second-guessed myself. I let my perfectionism about the “right” kind of content, and my fear of being judged, stop me from sharing what I loved most: building and solving problems.

Most of what I wrote between 2012 and 2018 is dated enough now that resurrecting it wouldn’t help anyone. So this is a clean slate, and I’m glad to finally start again.

What you’ll find here are honest (read: blunt) takes on software, systems, and what it actually looks like to build things that last. Big things are coming at my day job, and with some of the side projects I’ve been cooking up in the shadows, including the growing pains and lessons that came with them. I’ll probably write about fitness and bodybuilding too, since I train seriously and it’s become a real part of my life the past few years. Reading will show up, and probably some gaming, since I have a deep love for Dark Souls, Bloodborne, souls-likes, RPGs, and FPS games, and it’s one of the ways I spend my free time. That, and whatever else I’m thinking about that seems worth throwing into the void.

Enjoy the ride.