One Year In

I started 2025 with a goal to write and publish essays about software. That was my entire focus with this site and, I'm happy to say, I did just that. I didn't focus on specific themes around software, just whatever I had been thinking about and wanted to share. But when I looked back, several themes did emerge: Engineering Leadership, Product Engineering, Software Design, and Software Development. In retrospect, it makes sense. These are all topics that I'm deeply passionate about. For 2026, my goal is to continue writing in these areas, and add a new focus on Reliability Engineering, which I have a lot of drafts and thoughts built up around.

Something else I noticed while reviewing this past year was that I had several essays that got a lot of interest, but people almost never sought out other things I wrote. I didn't put any effort into how the site was organized or designed, so again, in retrospect, this also makes sense. To help with my own focus and give visitors opportunities to discover related work, I organized everything into the four collections mentioned above and redesigned the site around them. This includes an updated front page, paragraphs at the end of every essay that explain the collection it was published in, as well as dedicated pages for each collection.

With the (very intentionally limited) analytics offered by Ghost, I can see page views per visitor over the past week have already increased from the previous 1:1 it was before, which is encouraging. For someone who doesn't use social media and isn't really active in any established community, starting to publish on the internet can feel daunting, so it's been encouraging to get comments and see things resonate.

In addition to continuing to publish essays like I've been doing, I also wanted to have an opportunity to publish Linked Posts – links to articles that interest me, with some added commentary. Linked Posts are something I've been a fan of ever since I started reading Daring Fireball more than two decades ago. There are so many fantastic articles that I've wanted to share over the past year, and I'm excited to have a place to do that now.

With the site organized around collections and a focus on building out deeper work in these areas, I'm looking forward to where things go from here.