Manifesto

Preamble

I've been through a handful of transitions since college. I started my career designing analog circuits, was a software engineer in test, CTO of my own startup, engineering manager and then director, and CTO again. In my personal life, I got married, had a kid, and recently had another.

As both parenthood and startup life grew more intense, I found that I didn't have the ability to give my best self to either my family or company. I was distracted around my daughter and frustrated at work, all the while feeling increasingly fatigued.

This blog is part of the journey to find a different path.

Sustainable Joy

As my previous startup ended, I found myself reflecting on a few essential questions:

• what kind of work am I here to do?
• what sparks joy, brings energy, sustains me?
• what will I be doing 10 years from now?

The answer I found inside of me was:

I need to build tools that help people do more, and do it in a sustainable way

I've always worked as part of a team in a corporate or VC-backed startup setting, but the idea of "sustainable" development suggested for me a new path - bootstraping rather than fundraising, working with a community rather than coworkers.

Interlocking Projects

With that background, a series of ideas formed in my head for a set of projects that would work with each other to bring this vision to light. As I work on a project, part of the work is thinking about whether there is something that would accelerate that work, which in turn becomes its own project.

Here are a few of the projects and how they relate to each other:

• a productivity tool that will keep projects on track
• a blog to structure & share thoughts, learnings and updates
• an email platform to facilitate discussion and gather feedback
• a testing tool to make automated testing and validate reported bugs easier
• an analytics tool for understanding what kind of users are finding value
• a re-engagement tool for reminding users of the value they find

If you've been at a large company, you've probably seen all of these systems at work as part of the product development and learning lifecycle. I've built some version of each of these multiple times, and would like now to devote my energy to make the future building of such systems easier, hopefully in an open-source way.

What's Next

So that's the big plan - build projects that build on each other. Share what I've learned on the journey, get feedback, repeat, and see where that takes me. Figure out how to make a living from all of that.

It's going to push me to do things differently than I've ever done before, and that's the idea - to find a better way to live and work. I hope you'll stick around for the journey!