Hello World

Every programmer’s first line of code is some version of print("Hello, World"). It’s a small ritual. Proof that the machine is listening, that the wiring works, that something happens when you press run. Publishing this post feels much the same, except this time it’s my own site answering for the first time.

Welcome, then, to my corner of the internet. It took me longer to ship than I’d like to admit.

And yet building things like this for other people is exactly how I earn a living. Software architecture, data platforms, AI agents, and most recently a whole company, searchsquare, whose entire job is to make businesses show up when the internet (and now the language models) go looking for them. My own homepage, meanwhile, spent months as a tasteful, purely conceptual 404. “The cobbler’s kids go barefoot” is what a former boss said to me once, when I asked for more server capacity for our Big Data lab; it fits at least as well here. So “build personal site” sat on my backlog as a ticket and quietly aged.

I was simply busy with the work. There’s a particular trap for people who build for a living: your own projects always lose the prioritization battle to the ones with a deadline, a client, and a company behind them. searchsquare ate a lot of evenings, and it was worth it. But at some point the irony got too loud. So I opened a terminal, fired up Claude Code, and started telling an AI what to do, like every normal person does these days. So far, so good.

Building is my day job anyway. I’m an independent tech consultant, and the work runs from data engineering through AI agents and cloud to the unglamorous but load-bearing question of how systems should actually be designed. What I enjoy most isn’t the shiny part. It’s getting the abstractions right, asking “why” a few times before “how,” and distrusting any solution that’s exciting but fragile. Boring and robust beats clever and brittle almost every time, for me. (Almost. I’m only human, and some clever things are very tempting.)

Exactly that kind of thinking is what’s meant to land here from now on. Notes from the field, the things I learn while building, debugging, and occasionally arguing with my past self in code review. Some posts will be technical, some will be about the strange business of being a consultant. And all of them will, I hope, be honest about what actually worked, not just what looked good on the slide.

More soon, and thanks for being here for the initial commit.