I have 29 years of shipping software and I'd like to spend the next few doing exactly that, quietly, without anyone having to hear how it used to be done. It used to be done worse. There. That's the last you'll hear of it. I'm not asking for a title with \"Distinguished\" in it. I'm asking for a laptop, a ticket, and about forty-eight hours before you notice the ticket is closed. What follows is a legally binding list of the things I will not do, say, or visibly think, as a condition of employment.
\n\"Independent,\" which is what unemployment is called once it has a Stripe account. Built Kōlea, a complete newsletter and sales platform, alone, end to end. A 24-year-old founder would call that \"a lean team with 10x leverage\" and raise on it. I call it a Tuesday. It has a slop meter that catches machine-sounding writing, which I'm told is \"not a moat.\" It works, though. Things I build tend to.
\nLed engineering for Learn TV, then built Copilot training and delivered it to 800 Azure Core engineers at a time. By your own job description this makes me \"AI-native.\" I was born in the 1900s and I am AI-native. Both are true and I'd love to discuss neither. I'd love to discuss your backlog.
\nArrived by acquisition. Learned that \"synergy\" is the noise a company makes right before it reorganizes you. Left to start Big Machine, the only employer that has never asked me to do a take-home.
\nOne of the first video learning platforms for developers, with James Avery, back when \"creator\" wasn't a job and \"content\" was something a stomach had. Acquired by Pluralsight. I'd call it an exit but I'm not allowed to until I own a vest.
\nScott Guthrie called me personally. Worked on ASP.NET MVC with Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack and Guthrie; the four of us wrote Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and called ourselves the Five Heads. Hairline joke. I get exactly one per résumé and that was it.
\nMoved to Hawaii to quit tech and drive boats. PayPal, Visa, Starbucks and Google kept calling. Wrote the ASP.NET Commerce Starter Kit from a lanai: remote-first, two decades before it went on the careers page next to the ping-pong table.
\nTook a quieter job to be home with my kid. Your screening software will flag this as a \"gap.\" Your screening software has never met a toddler. The toddler is now an adult who ships code and has never once ghosted a recruiter, because I raised him right.
\nGrew a web consultancy to 30+ developers through the dot-com boom, then through the part after. So I've already lived through one \"this changes everything.\" I'm on my second. Still here. Still shipping. Not posting about it.
\nRocks, mostly. Also the office geek who put the lab data into Access and built the reports, which is the whole reason you're reading this. I pivoted before pivoting was a slide.
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