About me

I’m a software engineer at a big company. I’ve made a career in developer tooling, hacking things you use day to day without thinking like build systems, editor plugins, language integrations, etc.

You know, those things that you want to Just Work, and only notice when they blurt an error message out at you.

I promise that, in my day-to-day life, I’m a compassionate, empathetic engineer. If you work with me and come with an issue, I’ll do my darndest to help you. I’ll feel your pain and be empathetic. Tangent: turns out, people who work in dev tools tend to be the people who get the most annoyed when something doesn’t Just Work. We care a lot, that’s why we’re in this field.

However, this blog is not my day-to-day life. This is me venting. This is what comes out once I’ve spent all that empathy, understanding, and compassion after a day of debugging people’s problems when I know, for a fact, that they haven’t even tried to read the documentation.

If you’re the intended customer of the tools I work on, this blog is not for you.

I’ll repeat. If you have not worked on a tool for other developers, this blog is not for you. This is not the “me” you’ll see if we ever work together. Stop reading, and go say “thank you” to your local DevEx engineer. They need it.

If you’re a fellow mud-trudger, a comrade-in-muck who is sick of dealing another team’s twenty-year-old tech debt for months just to hear them complain that “I don’t want to learn your thing, your thing is new and confusing and scary”, then maybe your misery will find some company here.

Although, probably, even if you see yourself identified in these posts, you should stop reading anyway. As cathartic as they are to write, dwelling on misery for too long will probably make you unhappier in the long term.

Go outside and play in the sun instead.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.