Hello World
Hey! I’m Gregg. I’ve been working in software engineering for many years now and in recent times I’ve rarely written anything longer than a design doc.
But that changed recently, at a big life inflection point when I decided to leave my perfectly good job as an Engineering Manager at a Data Engineering consultancy in London and embark on an adventurous life change by moving to sunny Sydney. At the time of writing this, I don’t have a job to go to, and it’s just in time for one of the worst hiring markets anyone can remember in Sydney. Layoffs everywhere, hundreds of applicants per role, and recruiters ghosting me. Ask me to pick a worse time to move to the other side of the planet and I’d struggle.
So I’ve started writing. Partly because it keeps my brain busy, and partly because I have opinions and nowhere to put them. I’ve never been a person who works out what they think by talking it through in a meeting. I work it out by writing it down, trashing half of it and trying again until I’m happy with it. My thinking always happens through writing. I’ve just never published any of it to the big bad web for fear of being ridiculed. But my industry is in so much flux at the moment that I need to write (and build, and build some more) to try and make sense of where things are heading, and where I want to be in the next chapter of my career. I’d also like to share what I learn and what I think with the people who are going through the same things as me so maybe we can help each other.
I have to admit that I do find writing to be hard on one’s beliefs. An idea that sounds perfectly sensible in my head often falls apart once I commit to text. Gaps rear their heads and it becomes a game of whack-a-mole. The claim I’ve repeated in my head for weeks with no evidence behind it. The point that’s technically correct but actually boring as all hell. All of this results in binning off more drafts than I publish, and deservedly so my friends! Writing changes what I believe at least as much as my beliefs shape the writing. That’s an awkward thing to admit when I’m paid to have opinions.
My process isn’t sophisticated. I pull on whatever thread I can’t stop thinking about and I follow it until I either have something to say or realise I don’t. I’ll try to publish regularly, but I can’t promise it. I write for me. I write to understand, and to share that understanding with others.