I started this blog without a plan — that’s the honest answer.
There was no content strategy and no brand I was consciously building. Just things I was thinking about — leadership decisions I’d made and wasn’t sure I’d made correctly, patterns I kept seeing across teams, ideas I’d formed but never tried to articulate out loud — and at some point someone suggested I write them down and put them somewhere. So I did.
What surprised me was what happened in the writing itself, before any of it was published.
There’s something that happens when you try to explain something you believe you understand. You start with a clear idea — a principle, an opinion, something that feels settled — and then you start writing and it becomes less clear. You’re reaching for the sentence that captures the thing, and the sentence keeps being wrong, or partial, or you realize it has an obvious objection you hadn’t considered. Writing exposes the gaps between “I understand this” and “I can actually articulate this.” Those are not the same thing, and I had been treating them as though they were for most of my career.
Early in my time at AWS, I found myself in a lot of conversations where I had strong opinions but struggled to express them with precision. Not because I was uncertain — I was often very sure — but because I hadn’t done the work of converting intuition into language. When you’re sure about something and can’t explain why, you end up either sounding vague or sounding dogmatic. Neither is useful when you’re trying to influence a decision or help someone think through a problem. Writing, for me, has been the practice that narrows that gap. By the time I’ve written through an idea carefully, I either understand it better than I did before, or I’ve discovered that I didn’t understand it as well as I thought, which is equally valuable information.
The other thing writing gives me is a record. This matters more to me now than I expected it to when I started.
I can go back and read things I wrote a few years ago and see what I believed then. Sometimes I read something and I’m surprised to find I still agree with it, that the intuition I had turned out to hold up under more experience. More often, I read something and I see exactly where I was missing something — a nuance I hadn’t encountered yet, an assumption that turned out not to be true, a confidence that didn’t survive contact with more complicated situations. That’s not embarrassing to me. That’s useful. It’s a concrete way of tracking how my thinking has changed and whether it’s changing in the direction of more understanding or just accumulating new blind spots.
There’s a version of writing about leadership and engineering that’s really just personal marketing — here are my frameworks, here are my credentials, here are the reasons you should take me seriously. I don’t think that writing is worthless, but it’s not what I’m trying to do. What I’m trying to do is think out loud, in a medium that forces precision, about things I actually care about and am genuinely uncertain about. The writing works best when I’m working something out, not presenting a conclusion.
I also write because I have benefited enormously from people who did. There are engineers and leaders whose writing I’ve been reading for years — people who’ve put their real thinking on the page, not the clean version, not the version where they already knew the answer — and those are the pieces that have actually changed how I work. I owe some part of how I think about management, about technical trade-offs, about building teams, to people I’ve never met who wrote honestly about what they’d learned and gotten wrong. The least I can do is try to pay that forward.
This isn’t a platform play or a thought leadership project — it’s just what happens when you write about things you actually think about and put it somewhere people can find it.
If something here is useful to you, I’m glad. If something here turns out to be wrong, tell me — I’d rather know. That’s the deal I’m trying to make with this.