Welcome to the Blog

I've spent the last year writing publicly on LinkedIn. The numbers were a nice surprise — top of a couple of Cameroon creator lists, a steady stream of DMs, the occasional post that travelled further than I expected.

The numbers are not why I'm starting this blog.

What writing in public taught me

The thing I didn't expect when I started posting is how much the writing changes the writer. You cannot compress a lesson into 1,300 characters without first understanding it well enough to throw away the ninety percent that doesn't matter. That compression is the work. The post is just the by-product.

After a year of that compression, I've noticed something: the lessons I most want to keep don't fit in a LinkedIn caption. They need room. The nuance, the second-order trade-off, the example that makes the principle land — all of it gets cut for character count, and the version that survives is thinner than what I actually believe.

This blog is the longer container.

What you'll find here

Three threads, mostly:

• Engineering essays from the work I do at Social Finance and the projects I've built across 35+ startups at Lambdaa.
• Field notes from running the Hustlers Engineering Community — what works, what doesn't, what nobody tells you about building a peer group from scratch.
• Career pieces for engineers who didn't take the standard path. People who started without a roadmap, a mentor, or a stable internet connection. People I recognise because I was one of them.

No 10x productivity hacks. No "I rewrote my entire stack in Rust over the weekend." No takes I don't actually believe written for the algorithm. Just the work, honestly described.

A standing invitation

If something here is useful, send it to one person. If something here is wrong, tell me — properly, in a reply or a DM. The best conversations I've had about software started with a stranger pushing back on a paragraph I'd published.

Two more notes before I stop:

On cadence. I'd rather post one essay a month I'm proud of than four a week I'm not. If a couple of weeks go by quietly, it means I'm working on something longer or doing the actual job that funds the writing.

On who this is for. If you're a engineer looking for novel architecture takes, you'll find some of that here, but probably not enough to justify a subscription. If you're earlier in the path — figuring out how to price yourself, whether to start a community, what to actually build — this is the blog I wish I'd had.

Talk soon.