What this site is (and isn’t)

I’m Ryan. I build software for a living, but I’m mostly interested in what happens around the code: how good decisions get made, how teams scale, and why smart people still get stuck.

This isn’t a portfolio disguised as a website. It’s a writing hub. A place for essays and notes about engineering leadership, developer productivity, and the builder’s mind (with occasional Stoic-flavored self-interrogation).

How to read this site

• Blog: longer essays — models, playbooks, and opinions I’m willing to defend.
• Notes: shorter, denser fragments — ideas in motion, quotes, TILs, questions.
• Tags: if you want to browse by theme instead of chronology.

What I write about

• Engineering leadership: influence, delegation, judgment, and scaling outcomes beyond your own hands.
• Developer productivity: systems (not hacks) for attention, energy, and shipping.
• Builder psychology: identity, self-reliance, perfectionism, and the weird incentives in our heads.
• Stoicism (applied): control vs influence, resilience, and virtues as engineering behaviors.

Ground rules

• No proprietary work details. Patterns and lessons, not internal screenshots.
• Quality over quantity. If nothing is worth publishing, nothing gets published.
• Practical over performative. If it can’t cash out into behavior, it probably doesn’t belong here.

If you’re new: start with the latest essay, then fall into the notes when you want the unpolished version of my brain.