I started this website in 2019. The plan was simple. Put my work somewhere, write down what I learned along the way, and keep a log of my running.

Seven years later, the site had a homepage with zero posts.

The honest reason is that I’m not a writer. Every time I opened a blank editor, the same thing happened. I’d think of something worth sharing, then think of ten people who could explain it better, and close the tab. What I did instead was redesign. New font, new layout, nav bar moved three pixels left. It feels like progress. It isn’t, when the whole point of the site is the writing.

I was also waiting for a milestone big enough to justify a first post. There’s always a better version of yourself somewhere ahead, and it’s easy to decide that person should be the one writing.

Two things changed that.

The first is that I don’t have to do the writing alone anymore. AI turned out to be a decent writing partner. Not a ghostwriter, and not a substitute for having something to say, but something like an editor who’s always awake. I can hand it a messy paragraph and get back a question like “what actually happened here?” That question is usually the thing I was avoiding. The ideas still have to be mine and the experiences definitely have to be mine. But the distance between “I have a thought” and “this is readable” used to be wide enough that I never crossed it. Now it isn’t.

The second is that September of 2025, I started my Master of Science in Computer Science.

Going back to school while working is its own kind of experience. The reading, the deadlines, the specific feeling of opening a paper at 11 PM and not understanding the first paragraph. I’ve been learning a lot and almost none of it is written down anywhere except my own notes, where it helps nobody, including me. That’s what finally made the empty site feel wasteful. Every semester is a stack of things I struggled with and eventually figured out, and somebody a year behind me is going to struggle with the same ones.

Then yesterday it rained all day. Nothing to do outside, no reason to be anywhere.

So I opened the repo, and instead of another careful redesign, I just built. Described what I wanted, let the AI generate it, kept what worked, threw out what didn’t. Vibe coding, more or less. Less deliberating, more shipping. A few hours later I had a revamped site that works. Not perfect. Good enough to publish on, which is a bar I somehow never cleared in seven years of aiming at a higher one.

Then I wrote this.

Three things will show up here.

Building. What I’m working on, what broke, what I’d do differently. The lessons part of the original 2019 plan, finally.

Studying. Grad School as it happens. Coursework, research, papers I’m trying to understand, and the logistics of all of it while everything else keeps going.

Moving. Running and the places I end up. The slow project of getting better at something measured in seconds, plus whatever happens away from a desk.

They don’t obviously belong together, but from where I’m standing they’re the same thing. Showing up at something hard, consistently, and writing down what I find.

No posting schedule. Schedules are how I’ve talked myself out of things before, because a missed week feels like a failed project and a failed project is easy to abandon. The plan is simpler than that. Write when there’s something real to write about, and publish it before it feels ready.

The second half is the hard part. Seven years of an empty homepage is decent evidence that “ready” is a bar I don’t reach on my own.

If you’re reading this, thanks for being here for the boring first one. The next will be about something.