I have recently crossed over 5 years into my professional career and it has served as a great time for self reflection.
What has gone well? What about not so well? What about goals for the future?
Throughout my evaluation one thing that consistently came to the forefront was a lack of publicly demonstrating my work. Initially I shied away from this due to my general distaste of social media. Pair that with my lack of consistent coding projects and Git was out of the equation too.
However, in 2026 I am committing to building in public. Claude Code has relit my interest and willingness to develop code and work on projects (see this custom website built entirely by Claude and deployed on AWS).
In addition I have learned to appreciate other ways to build. Previously I had been too closed-minded when thinking about what I could build. For example, while not super concrete like a GitHub project, what about building a reputation? It seems clear to me now that you can use written blogs to share your ideas, develop thought leadership and garner a growing perspective. Hence, the reason for this category in my blog — a place to write looser and brainstorm more. Topics may vary but the one thing that will always stay consistent is the person behind the keyboard.
This blog is split into three lanes:
- Engineering — what I’m building, technical decisions, side projects
- Perspective — opinion, culture, stories from paying attention to the world
- Product — how I think about companies, industries, and where things are going
I appreciate your time spent looking a little deeper into my perspective.
-Jake