Awake again

I ran a plan the other night and watched a whole environment describe itself back to me. The network, the load balancers, the database, the cache, the DNS, all of it laid out in text I could read top to bottom. One command turned that text into running infrastructure. I sat there grinning like it was the first program I ever shipped.

I had not felt that in a while. Somewhere in the last few years I went quiet. Still working, still leading, still shipping, but the part of me that loves to build had been idling in the background. I did not notice it fade. I noticed it come back.

The long way here

The path took its time. I started on the frontend, making things people could see and touch. That pulled me into the full stack, where I learned to own a feature from the database all the way to the pixel. From there I grew into leading. I built and ran an engineering organization of twenty five people, carried several projects at once, modernized an aging platform, and helped a company move faster while keeping the lights on. I loved that work. Standing up a team, mentoring engineers into leaders, turning noise into a rhythm. I would do it again tomorrow.

Along the way I started building on my own. A studio first, then products that came out of it. One of them, Unyform, grew out of a smaller tool I made for myself called MechCrate. MechCrate was me getting tired of wiring up the same machinery for every project, so I built one opinionated system that handled local development, operations, and production deploys, then let an AI drive it. Unyform took that further and turned it into a way for a whole company to connect its stack once and let AI work inside real guardrails.

All in on infrastructure

This year I went all in on the part I had been circling for a long time. I joined a team full time as a DevOps engineer, working on infrastructure that runs at a scale I used to architect only from a distance. Real compliance, real load, systems people depend on to get through their day. My last role gave me a taste of this. Now it is the whole meal. I spend my days scaling cloud systems across two major providers, writing infrastructure as code, and automating the boring and the dangerous parts until they stop being either.

Terraform is my main instrument now. There is something honest about infrastructure you can read. The whole environment sits in files. You propose a change, you see exactly what will happen before it happens, and then it happens the same way every time. After years of clicking through consoles and hoping, that kind of predictability feels like a superpower. Rust is the other language I am leaning into this year, for the tooling I build around all of it. Those two are my 2026.

A command center of my own

Outside of work, the automation habit has fully taken over. I built a dashboard for my own life that ties my workflows together through a set of MCP servers. Email, messaging, my calendar, documents that need signing, the platforms I post to, my notes and my projects, all reachable from one place an AI can operate on my behalf. I describe what I want and the machinery does the reaching. What used to be an afternoon of switching tabs is now a sentence.

The real change is the gap between having an idea and holding a working version of it. That gap used to be weeks. Now it is days, sometimes a single evening. I am motivated and equipped at the same moment, and that pairing is rare enough that I am not taking it for granted. Ideas I would have filed under someday are shipping this week.

Building is the thing that drives me

Here is the honest part. I love leading. Building teams and helping people grow into their own has been some of the most meaningful work of my life. And underneath all of it, the steady thing that has always driven me is building the systems themselves. Getting my hands into the machine and making it run. This year I found a way to hold both at once, and it woke something up.

I keep at this for the work and for the fun, because the fun is what keeps the work honest. It is what pushes me one step past the limit I found yesterday. I spent a few years quiet. I am awake now, and I am building again.