August 15, 2026
Why I'm starting to write this down
Four years at one company, a move to a startup, and a system design course that made me realize how much I'd been learning by accident.
I spent four years at Menlo Security. I joined as an intern and left as an engineer, which means I learned my craft inside one codebase — deeply, but narrowly. You pick up an enormous amount that way. You also pick up habits you can’t see, because you’ve never worked anywhere that does it differently.
About five months ago I moved to Acceldata. Startup pace, a new domain, and a set of assumptions I didn’t know I was carrying until they stopped being true.
The thing that pushed me to write
Around the same time, I started working through a system design masterclass. That turned out to be the more disorienting change of the two.
Four years of production work teaches you a lot of system design — but by osmosis. You learn caching because something fell over. You learn about queues because a synchronous call timed out at the worst possible moment. The knowledge is real, but it’s shaped like a list of incidents rather than a set of principles, and you can’t reliably apply it to a problem you haven’t already been burned by.
Studying the material deliberately made the gaps obvious. Not gaps in what I’d done, but in what I could explain. There’s a specific, uncomfortable feeling in realizing you’ve used a thing successfully for years and can’t articulate why it works.
Writing seems like the fix. It’s much harder to fool yourself in prose than in your own head.
What this is going to be
Notes as I go. System design concepts I’m working through, written in my own words as a test of whether I actually understand them. Problems I’ve hit at work, written up while the details are still sharp. And occasionally the non-technical parts of this job — the transitions, the tradeoffs, the things that turn out to matter more than the tech stack.
What it isn’t
Polished takes with a thesis I picked in advance. If a post changes its mind halfway through, that’s the process showing, not something I forgot to edit out. I’d rather publish something honest and be corrected than publish something safe and learn nothing.
More soon.