This is a strange thing to admit when you’re trying to build one.
I’ve had jobs. I’ve worked summers. I’ve worked as a bartender. I’ve done things people do to earn money. But I have never really had a career.
There isn’t a company I can point to and say: this is where I became an engineer. There isn’t a neat sequence of increasingly senior titles.
For a long time, that bothered me. Especially in software, because so much of professional identity is compressed into a timeline: Junior Developer. Developer. Senior Developer. Company A. Company B. Five years of experience. Seven years of experience.
Meanwhile my own timeline looks more like somebody dropped a box of cables onto the floor.
I’ve always been around computers. I’ve always had the urge to understand systems. I’ve built software, worked on open source, designed products, spent ridiculous amounts of time thinking through technical problems, and repeatedly found myself doing things that feel very much like engineering—but without the institutional stamp that says: yes, this counts.
I’m starting to care less about that.
Not because professional experience is meaningless. It isn’t. Working with people, production systems, deadlines, and consequences teaches things that solitary work cannot.
But I can’t go backwards and manufacture the conventional history I didn’t have. What I can do is build another kind of history:
- Things I’ve made.
- Things I’ve shipped.
- People I’ve helped.
- Projects I’ve contributed to.
- Mistakes I’ve documented.
- Systems I’ve operated.
- Users I’ve talked to.
- Eventually, hopefully, customers I’ve served.
A career built from evidence rather than chronology.
Maybe I’ll still take a software job at some point. I’m not opposed to employment on principle. I just don’t want my entire future to depend on someone eventually deciding that my past looks conventional enough.
I’d rather start making the future legible. This site is partly for that.