I've been walking again. Ten thousand steps a day this past week, through the hills in Seattle. I leave with my head full of the usual noise. Token limits, model benchmarks, another company announcing layoffs and pointing vaguely at AI as the reason. Meta cut 8,000 people recently. The industry is moving fast and the ground underneath it is shifting.

But somewhere around the third hill, the noise fades. The trees are just trees. The clouds are just clouds. The incline makes my legs burn and my breathing shorten and I welcome it because it's real and it's mine. No model generated the view from the top. No tool optimized the route. I walked it.

By the time I'm home, the takes and the panic and the predictions have all gone quiet, and what's left is something closer to clarity.

I am not writing this from the outside. I use AI tools every day, and they have made me better at what I do.

I built Pura Letra, a reading app, almost entirely with Claude Code. I'm an experienced engineer. I know how to architect software, how to make decisions about databases and infrastructure and tradeoffs. But Claude Code handled the implementation at a speed that would have taken me months on my own. What used to be a six-month side project became a working product in weeks.

AI also helped me build the financial model I wrote about earlier in this series. My specific numbers, my specific debt, my specific cost of living, all structured into a spreadsheet that finally made the exit math visible. I could have done it myself. It would have taken me a full weekend. Instead it took an evening.

This is the leverage. Twenty-five years of engineering experience, amplified by tools that can move as fast as I can think. For someone like me, building toward independence, that leverage is everything. It means I can ship products, test ideas, and iterate without a team. It means the economics of being a solo builder have changed in my favor for the first time in my career.

I wrote about that in an earlier essay. AI is the fourth technology shift I've lived through, and it's the first one that favors the individual over the institution. I still believe that.

But I've started noticing something else.

At work, and across the industry, there's a growing pressure to use AI for everything. Executives want to see adoption metrics. Managers want to know their teams are "leveraging AI." I've heard that Amazon tracks developer token usage to measure productivity. The message is clear: if you're not using the tools, you're falling behind.

And people are using them. Engineers, writers, designers, analysts. The tools are good enough now that you can produce work that looks competent without fully understanding what you produced. You can generate code that runs, copy that reads well, analyses that seem thorough. The output passes inspection. The question is whether the person behind it is learning anything in the process.

I think about this more than I probably should. When I was coming up as an engineer, there was no shortcut through the fundamentals. I sat with Visual Studio 6 and broke things and fixed them and broke them again until the patterns lived in my hands, not just my head. The understanding was physical, earned through repetition and failure. That foundation is what makes me useful to AI tools now. I know what to ask for because I spent decades learning what matters.

What happens to the person who never builds that foundation?

This is the part that concerns me most, and it's not about engineers specifically. It's about everyone.

When the premium model is available and the tokens are flowing, people perform at a high level. The work gets done. The output is polished. But what happens when you run out of requests for the day? What happens when the model is down, or the subscription lapses, or the company decides the cost is too high?

Because the cost is real. These models are expensive to run. The good ones, the ones that produce the results people are building their workflows around, are not cheap. Companies are pushing adoption while also watching the bill climb. There's a tension there that nobody is talking about openly. And on the individual level, people are developing a dependency on tools they don't control and can't afford indefinitely.

I've seen it in small ways already. The moment someone hits a token limit and their productivity drops. The frustration isn't "I have to do this the slow way now." The frustration is closer to "I don't know how to do this without the tool." That's a different thing entirely. That's not inconvenience. That's fragility.

There's another side to this that I think about on my walks. Everyone can build now. That sounds like good news, and in many ways it is. It's the reason I was able to ship Pura Letra as a solo developer. It's the reason someone with a good idea and basic technical sense can prototype something in a weekend that would have required a team a few years ago.

But more creation doesn't mean better creation. We've seen this pattern before. Streaming services made it easy to produce and distribute content at scale. The result wasn't more great television. It was an ocean of mediocre content that made the great stuff harder to find. The same thing is starting to happen with software, with writing, with design. The barrier to making something dropped, but the barrier to making something good didn't move.

I notice it already. The apps that clearly came from a weekend prompt session. The blog posts that read like they were generated in one pass and published without a second thought. The pitch decks that are polished on the surface and hollow underneath. There's a sameness creeping in, and it's the sameness of output that was never shaped by a human who cared enough to revise it.

I don't have a resolution for any of this. I'm not going to tell you AI is good or bad, that it will save us or destroy us. I use it every day and I'll use it again tomorrow. It has changed what's possible for me, personally, in ways I couldn't have imagined five years ago.

But I also know that the things I value most about my work, the judgment, the instinct for what matters, the ability to look at a system and know where it's fragile, none of that came from a model. It came from twenty-five years of building things the slow way. And I worry about a version of the future where fewer people get the chance to build that foundation because the tools made it feel unnecessary.

The younger generation concerns me the most. Not because they're less capable. Because they're entering a world where the shortcut is the default, where the tool is the first option instead of the last resort, and where the patience required to truly learn something might feel like a waste of time when the machine can do it for you in seconds. They might be right. I hope they're not.

The hills near my house don't get easier. That's the point. Every walk is the same incline, the same burn, the same moment where I want to slow down and don't. The clouds at the top don't care about my token usage or my productivity metrics. The air is just air. My legs are just tired.

I think the reason I keep walking is because it's the one part of my day where I'm not augmented. Not optimized. Not leveraged. Just a person moving through the world, thinking at the speed of thought, arriving at whatever I arrive at on my own. It's slower. It's harder. And something about that still matters to me.

I'm not ready to let that go.

This is essay twelve of Building My Way Out, a weekly series about one engineer's attempt to build a life beyond employment. New essays every Friday. If you're not subscribed, you can sign up here.

It's Saturday morning in Seattle and I'm at a coffee shop, writing. A week ago I was in New York. The week before that, Chicago. I've been on the road for most of May, and now that I'm home, sitting still, the trip is starting to settle into something I can actually see.

We flew to New York to visit our kids and spend Mother's Day together. That was the plan, at least. The reality was more complicated. I still had to work, so most of my days were spent in the hotel room with my laptop open while my wife waited. Both of our kids work too. We'd meet for dinner, spend some evenings together, and by the time we said goodnight it felt like the visit was already slipping away.

This is the math of a trip when everyone works. You fly across the country to see the people you love, and then you sit in a hotel room on a Tuesday morning, on a call, while the city and your family carry on without you. We had evenings. We had Mother's Day, which our daughter spent cooking for us on the roof terrace of her apartment. On Sunday we visited the hotel where she's getting married in November, the same venue we'd seen on our fall trip, now feeling more real with the date getting closer. But the days between those moments were mine only in the evenings, and it wasn't as much time as I wanted. It never is.

On our last day, just hours before we had to leave for the airport, my wife and I met our son and daughter for coffee at a place near my son's office. In our conversation, my son said something that stayed with me. He's 23 and living in the city, and he mentioned how he wishes he could own his time. Do what he wants, when he wants to do it. He said it casually, the way you say things when you don't realize how heavy they are. I recognized the words because they could have been mine. The same want, thirty years apart. I thought about that for a while. Whether I put that in him somehow, whether he picked it up from watching me. Probably not. I shouldn't give myself that much importance. The desire to own your time isn't inherited. It's just human.

On Saturday, my wife and I rented a small SUV and drove east to Montauk. She'd been wanting to go since she watched a TV series set there years ago, and we finally had a day with nothing on the calendar. No work. No dinner plans. No one else's schedule to navigate.

It was cloudy when we left the city. By the time we got to Montauk, we were hungry, and we found a place called Bird on the Roof. Good coffee, excellent breakfast, the kind of service where nobody rushes you. My wife sat by the window reading the menu with a painted seagull on the glass behind her and "montauk, ny" written underneath. It was one of those small, perfect moments you don't plan.

After breakfast we walked the main street, looked in a few shops. The clouds had cleared by then and it was getting warm. My wife went into a store and came out with a blanket so we could sit on the beach. We walked down a sandy path between dune fences and found the beach almost empty. Wide, open, with waves crashing hard enough that you understood why Montauk is a surfing town.

Here's where I have to admit something. I'd left my sunglasses at the hotel because the forecast said cloudy all day. But there on the beach, the sun was out and glowing and I could barely keep my eyes open. We didn't stay long. We walked back to town and my wife bought me a pair of aviator Ray-Bans. I'd never owned anything like that. It was fun, and more importantly, I could see again.

We drove to the Montauk Point Lighthouse. It was cloudy again by the time we arrived, windy, the kind of weather that makes a lighthouse feel like it belongs exactly where it is. We toured the museum, climbed the spiral stairs all the way to the top, and stood there looking at the light up close. A magnificent piece of engineering, still doing what it was built to do over two hundred years ago.

After that we walked around the point, took some selfies, held hands. I felt like we were a young couple on a date. My wife started picking through rocks and shells along the water's edge, the lighthouse behind us, the enormous boulders along the jetty breaking the waves. It was peaceful and wonderful all at once.

That whole day, nobody needed to be anywhere. We ate when we were hungry. We walked where we wanted. We stayed as long as the moment lasted. Before driving back to the city, we stopped at LUNCH, the lobster roll place on the side of the road just outside of town. We got lobster rolls. Of course we did.

This is the kind of travel I keep thinking about for the next chapter of my life. Slow. Unscheduled. New towns, independent restaurants, sitting somewhere and not checking the time.

The day was everything I want more of. And there was only one thing missing, the thing I noticed without looking for it.

Our kids.

We'd spent the whole week in the same city as two of them (our younger son was back in Seattle), squeezing dinners into the gaps between everyone's work schedule. And then on the one day that actually felt like the life I'm building toward, they weren't there. Not because of distance. Because of the same thing that keeps all of us from the lives we want. Time that belongs to someone else.

My son wants to own his time. He's 23. I'm 52. The want is the same. And it's not just him, my daughter and younger son have mentioned the same want in one way or another. The difference is I've had thirty more years of it, and I know now that the feeling doesn't fade on its own. You either build your way to something different, or you keep squeezing the people you love into the spaces your schedule allows.

I read something this morning that stuck with me. The idea that every day, when you wake up, the day is just a draft. You can revise it or let it go as-is. Most days I let the draft stand. I open the laptop, I do what's expected, I close it. But that Saturday in Montauk was a revision. A glimpse of what a final draft could look like.

I'm back in Seattle now, writing on a Saturday because my Fridays belong to someone else again. A few months ago I had a flex schedule that gave me three-day weekends, and I didn't take enough advantage of it. That's the kind of thing you only see clearly after it's gone.

But I'm here. The coffee shop is quiet. The essay is finding its shape. And somewhere between the hotel room in New York and the lighthouse in Montauk, I got a little clearer on what I'm building toward. Not a beach. Not a town. A day where the people I love and the time to enjoy them aren't scheduled around someone else's calendar.

That's the draft I want to revise.

This is essay nine of Building My Way Out, a weekly series about one engineer's attempt to build a life beyond employment.

It's 4 AM and I managed to sleep a few hours. My ride is about to get here, I need to go downstairs. The ride to the airport takes about 15 minutes, this driver is going fast, a little too fast for my liking. Once at the airport, I quickly go through security and then find an empty seat at the lounge near my gate. I am on my way to Chicago, we have an onsite from work, and I am excited to meet the people who I work with in person. We've done these onsites before, but it's been a few years since the last one and I haven't met half of my team in person yet.

Three days of working in the same room with people I usually see as small rectangles on a screen. We had lunch at a place near the office where everyone ordered too much food and nobody cared. After the work sessions, some of us went downtown, and we talked about things that had nothing to do with code or deadlines. I learned more about my coworkers in two hours than I had in a year of standups.

On the last day we talked about projects for the rest of the year. At some point the conversation turned technical, the kind of back and forth about how something works and how to make it better that I never get tired of. Someone drew boxes on a whiteboard and we argued about the right way to do something that probably doesn't matter to anyone outside that room. Architecture decisions, tradeoffs, what to build next. I left with a few pages of notes and the kind of energy I haven't felt at work in a while.

I thought about that energy the whole walk back to the hotel. Not the specifics of what we discussed, but what it revealed about the kind of work that still gets me going after twenty-five years.

Nobody in that room was talking about strategy decks or quarterly OKRs. We were talking about the thing itself. That is the work I love. It always has been.

I've thought about the management path many times over the years. Every time, I arrive at the same answer.

I like the building part.

Not the meetings about the building. Not the planning of the building. Not the alignment of stakeholders around the prioritization of the building. The building.

There's a version of my career where I took the management track ten or fifteen years ago. I'd probably earn more. I'd have a more impressive title. But I also know what would have happened to the hours between 9 PM and midnight, the hours I've spent for years working on my own projects. Management is the kind of work that doesn't clock out when you close your laptop. The mental overhead of navigating team dynamics, politics, performance reviews, it follows you home. And those evening hours are the hours that matter most to what I'm trying to do now.

In tech, staying as an individual contributor past a certain age gets treated like a lack of ambition. Like you topped out. Like you weren't good enough for the "real" leadership work. I used to feel defensive about it. I don't anymore. Building things is the work. It always has been for me. The tool I built at work last week and the scripts I wrote on a factory floor in Minnesota twenty-five years ago are the same instinct. Give me a problem and let me build something that solves it.

What I've come to understand is that this instinct, the one that kept me on the builder's track at work, is the same one pushing me to build my way out. I don't want to manage a team at my job, and I don't want to build a company that requires me to manage a team outside of it. I want to write code. I want to ship things. I want to solve problems with my hands on the keyboard, not on an org chart.

That's what PuraLetra is. A tool I built on evenings and weekends because the reading app I used for years shut down and nothing replaced it. Nobody assigned it. Nobody scheduled a planning meeting. I opened my editor and started building, the same way I've always worked best. The skill is the same whether I'm solving a problem at work or solving one on my own. What I'm trying to change is the context.

The onsite reminded me of something I forget when I'm deep in the routine of remote work. I like my coworkers. The job isn't bad. I'm not running from something broken. I'm building toward something I want more. And the fact that I've spent twenty-five years staying close to the craft, sharpening the exact skill set that lets me build alone, without investors, without a team, without permission, that doesn't feel like a career that stalled. It feels like preparation I didn't know I was doing.

My wife flew to Chicago on Friday and we spent the weekend there. On Sunday evening we flew to New York to visit our kids. On the flight, half asleep with my laptop open, I started sketching out a feature I want to add to PuraLetra. Twenty-five years of staying on the builder's track, and the instinct is the same whether I'm at a whiteboard with my team or in seat 14C with my wife asleep next to me.

This is part of Building My Way Out, a weekly series about one engineer's attempt to build a life beyond employment. New essays every Friday. If you're not subscribed, you can sign up here.

We drove to Vancouver last weekend. No particular reason. My wife and I had a free Saturday and Sunday, and Vancouver is close enough from Bellevue that you can leave in the morning, cross the border, and be walking around a different city by early afternoon.

After checking into the hotel we walked to the waterfront and took a water taxi to Granville Island. We found a spot at one of the food stalls and ordered lobster rolls. A street musician was playing nearby. He was playing Tennessee Whiskey. I remember eating slowly and not checking my phone.

For about an hour, nothing else existed. Not my job, not the projects piling up at work, not PuraLetra sitting at thirty users, not the essay I needed to write by Friday. Not the question of what I'm building or whether it's working. Just a lobster roll, a musician, and a Saturday afternoon in a city that wasn't home, accompanied by my wife.

I haven't had many moments like that lately.

The past few weeks have been full. Work has been intense. Work has kept me busy beyond my usual scope. I've been helping outside my team, and there are a few things on the horizon I'm still thinking through. I had a company hackathon. Participated with two different projects. Next week I fly to Chicago for a work on-site, and after that my wife is meeting me and we're flying to New York to visit our son and daughter.

Meanwhile, PuraLetra has been sitting still. Thirty free users. I shipped a couple of new features recently, article collections and a trend discovery page, but the user count hasn't moved. The newsletter picked up a few new subscribers, but the LinkedIn engagement that felt strong in the first few weeks has slowed down. By any measurable standard, the building-my-way-out project is in a quiet period.

I am not going to pretend that doesn't bother me. I write a weekly essay about building toward independence, and right now I'm not building much. I'm working, I'm traveling, I'm living. But the side of things that's supposed to be my future is on pause.

There is a version of productivity culture that would tell me the Vancouver weekend was a mistake. That I should have been shipping features, writing copy, figuring out distribution. That every weekend is either a sprint toward the exit or a wasted opportunity. I've read enough of that advice to recognize it. I've also lived long enough to know it's wrong.

My kids live across the country in New York. My wife and I have the kind of life where we can drive to another country on a Saturday morning because the weather looked good. If I can't enjoy that because I'm calculating how many more users PuraLetra needs, then I've already lost the thing I'm supposedly building toward.

This is the part that's easy to forget. The whole premise of this series is that I want more freedom, more autonomy, more control over how I spend my days. But some of that freedom is already here. Not all of it. Not the financial part. But the part where I get to sit on Granville Island with my wife on a Saturday afternoon or take a long walk around Stanley Park and not think about anything for an hour. That part exists right now.

I think about my parents in Mexico. They didn't have a plan to build their way out of anything. They worked because that was what you did, and they rested when they could. But the moments I remember most from growing up aren't the ones where they were productive. They're the ones where we were all sitting together doing nothing in particular. A meal that lasted too long. A conversation that went nowhere. An evening where nobody had anywhere to be. A surprise weekend-long trip to Chapala just because.

Those moments weren't wasted time. They were the whole point.

I'm not arguing against building. I'll be back at it this week. I'll keep writing essays on Fridays, keep improving PuraLetra, keep working through the math I laid out a few essays ago. The exit number hasn't changed. The desire to get there hasn't changed either.

But I'm starting to notice something about how I frame this project, even to myself. I talk about it as a journey toward something. Building my way out. As if the life I want is somewhere in the future, waiting for me to arrive. And maybe some of it is. But the Vancouver weekend reminded me that a lot of what I'm building toward is already happening in the spaces between the building.

Next week I'll be in Chicago for work. I am excited to meet some of my new coworkers in person. The week after, I'll be in New York with my family. I'll write from wherever I am. But I'm going to try to be there, too. Actually there. Not planning the next feature while my son or daughter is talking to me. Not drafting an essay in my head while walking through a city I love walking through.

The building will be here when I get back. It always is.

This is essay eight of Building My Way Out, a weekly series about one engineer's attempt to build a life beyond employment. New essays every Friday. If you're not subscribed, you can sign up here.

There was an announcement on Slack letting people know about the upcoming hackathon. I read it once, added my name to the signup page, and went back to whatever I was working on. I didn't think about it.

I remembered it yesterday morning, when another Slack message went out about the last day to register. Our manager mentioned it in standup too.

This is a newsletter called Building My Way Out. The title is not subtle. Every Friday for the last six weeks I've written about why I'm trying to build something outside of a full-time engineering job. I've written about the economics of leaving, about the app I started in September and shipped a few weeks ago, and about the four technology shifts I've watched remake my career.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I signed up for a company hackathon.

The contradiction isn't lost on me. What bothers me is that I did it without noticing. I didn't weigh it against anything. I didn't ask whether it served what I'm trying to build. I saw it, clicked, moved on. The instinct was automatic.

I've been doing some version of this my whole career. A project announcement lands in my inbox and I want in. A new framework comes out and I want to try it. Someone posts about a new AI model and I want to build something with it by the weekend. I've shipped more half-started things than finished ones. The constant, as I wrote in February, is the writing. Everything else has been a sequence of pickups and puts-downs.

The hackathon fits the pattern. So does something else I caught myself doing last week. A job listing for a staff engineer role at an AI company crossed my feed, and for about an afternoon I ran the calculation. I have the years. I have the track record. I could probably put together a credible application. And I'm writing a newsletter about building my way out of exactly this kind of job. But my ego still ran the calculation.

Why? I don't fully know. I've been trying to figure it out this week and I keep circling the same few possibilities.

One is that picking up new things is cheap. It costs a click, a registration, a couple of hours. It feels like progress. Focus costs more, because focus means committing, and committing means you have to be willing to watch the thing you committed to either work or not.

Another is that I've spent decades building a career where picking things up was rewarded. I got hired, promoted, respected, partly because I was the person who would take on the new thing, or the most legacy thing too. That's not a pattern I unlearn in six essays.

A third is that spreading yourself across many things protects you. PuraLetra is live. This newsletter is public, with a small and slowly growing subscriber list. Both of them can fall on their face in a way that a half-started side project never could. A hackathon is safe by comparison. You show up, you build something over a few days, nobody expects it to become a business or anything bigger.

I don't know which of these is closest to the truth. Maybe all of them. Maybe none.

I'm not going to drop out of the hackathon. I said yes, and backing out now would be its own small act of dishonesty. I'll show up, I'll build something, I'll probably enjoy it. The truth is I already have half the project done, and I'm excited about where it's going. There I go again.

But the essays and PuraLetra are the things that matter. Everything I do that isn't one of those two things, or the job that pays for both of them, is gravity pulling me back toward the default shape of my career. I'd like to be the kind of person who notices, next time, before signing up for the next thing.

Tags: Building My Way Out, Philosophy

A few weeks ago I wrote about launching PuraLetra on Product Hunt and getting exactly zero signups. I reframed the failure at the end of that essay. The problem wasn't that nobody wanted a clean article reader. The problem was that I hadn't figured out how to get in front of the people who might.

Turns out, the people who might were on Threads.

I posted about PuraLetra on Threads. Nothing elaborate. Just this:

"I built a reading app after Pocket shut down. Claude Code was my partner. Six months of work. I use it every day. Launched it on Product Hunt. Nobody came."

That was it. Within a day or two, the post had more engagement than anything I'd posted on any platform about PuraLetra. People replied. People signed up. Not thousands. Not hundreds. But real people, creating accounts, saving articles, using the thing I'd built.

Jonathan Bruck — an early advisor to Pocket — commented on my post. He talked about how Pocket's secret to distribution was getting journalists to use it, building the first share sheet SDK that every app relied on before iOS made its own. Then he landed on the same point I'd been circling: it's easier to build now, but harder to reach users.

Someone who helped build the thing that inspired my thing was telling me, publicly, that the problem I was facing was the same problem they'd solved, not with a better product, but with a better path to the people who needed it.

The most common thread in the replies wasn't about PuraLetra itself. It was about AI. People used my post to confirm something they already believed: that AI is making it easy for anyone to build an app, but the hard part, finding users, selling, distributing, is what separates a side project from a product. That's the wall these "vibe-coded" apps are going to hit.

I get the argument. And honestly, they're not entirely wrong. Distribution is the hard part. That's the whole point of this essay.

But I want to be precise about something, because it matters to me. I didn't vibe-code PuraLetra. I didn't describe an app in a prompt and wait for something to appear. I used Claude Code as a tool to augment what I already know how to do. I've been a software engineer for over two decades. I understand databases, architecture, tradeoffs. What Claude Code gave me was speed and reach — the ability to move through unfamiliar frontend territory faster, to stay in flow instead of stopping to search Stack Overflow every ten minutes, to build at the pace of my ideas instead of the pace of my typing.

There's a difference between using AI to skip the thinking and using AI to accelerate it. I did the thinking. I made the architectural decisions. I chose the tradeoffs. Claude Code was the best collaborator I've ever had, but it was a collaborator, not the architect.

That distinction might not matter to the people scrolling past my post. But it matters to me. And if you're an engineer reading this, it probably matters to you too.

Here's what I actually learned from the contrast between Product Hunt and Threads.

Product Hunt felt like the correct place to launch a product. It's where you're supposed to go. There's a whole ritual around it — the timing, the tagline, the first-day push. I followed it. I got nothing. Not because PuraLetra was wrong for that audience, but because I had no audience there. I was a stranger walking into a crowded room and hoping someone would notice.

Threads worked because I wasn't launching. I was telling a story in three lines. I built something. I use it every day. Nobody came. That honesty resonated more than any tagline. And the Pocket reference did most of the heavy lifting — it gave people an instant frame of reference. They didn't need to understand what a "clean article reader" was. They already missed Pocket. They already knew the gap.

Distribution isn't a step you bolt on after building. It's not a launch day. It's the accumulation of small moments where you show up in the right room and describe the right problem to people who already feel it. I'd been showing up on Threads for weeks before that post took off. Not strategically. Just consistently. And when the right post landed, there was enough context around it for people to take it seriously.

I think about this in the context of everything I'm trying to do with this newsletter. I spent months building PuraLetra. The product was ready long before anyone used it. What wasn't ready was the path between the product and the people who needed it.

In the last essay I wrote that I was shifting from "nobody wants this" to "I haven't found the right people yet." The Threads response confirmed the reframe. The people exist. The need is real. I just had to stop performing a launch and start having a conversation.

I don't have a grand theory about distribution. I have one data point. But it's the first data point that actually moved the needle, and I'm paying attention to what it's telling me.

If you want to try PuraLetra, it's at puraletra.com. And if you want to follow this experiment as it unfolds, I'll be here next week.

I have been reading online for as long as there has been something to read online. Technical blogs, essays, long-form journalism, fiction when I can find it. Before smartphones, before RSS readers, before social media decided what was worth your attention. Reading is one of those constants in my life that survived every job change, every move, every technology shift I wrote about a few weeks ago.

For years, my system was simple. I would find an article, save it to Pocket, and read it later in a clean, quiet layout. No ads, no banners, no autoplay videos. Just the text. Pocket was not a fancy tool. It did one thing and it did it well, and I used it almost every day for years.

Then Pocket announced it was shutting down.

I went looking for alternatives. I tried a few. None of them felt right. They were either bloated with features I didn't want, or they stripped out things I needed, or they looked like they were designed by someone who had never sat down and read a long article for pleasure.

So last September, I opened Claude Code and started building my own.

The app is called PuraLetra. The name is Spanish for "pure letter" or "pure text," which is exactly what it does. You paste an article URL, and it gives you the text in a clean layout with good typography. No ads, no clutter, no cookie walls, no invasive tracking. I use Plausible instead of Google Analytics because an app about clean reading shouldn't be watching you while you read. Just the writing.

I built it over evenings and weekends across about six months. Claude Code did the heavy lifting on implementation. I made the decisions about what it should do, how it should look, what mattered and what didn't. This is the dynamic I described in my essay about AI being the fourth technology shift. A solo builder with decades of experience and an AI tool that handles the implementation speed. The window I said was opening? I climbed through it.

As I used PuraLetra, I kept adding things I actually needed. I started highlighting passages I wanted to come back to, color-coding them by why they mattered. I tagged articles by topic so I could find that piece about database migrations six months later without scrolling through everything. I added a Chrome and Safari extension so saving an article was one click instead of a copy-paste. Dark mode, because I read at night.

Two features surprised me by becoming my favorites. The first is the reader digest, a weekly email that tells me what I have saved but haven't read yet. It is a small thing, but it turned PuraLetra from a tool I saved things to into a tool that reminded me to actually read them. The second is translation to Spanish. I am a native Spanish speaker, and being able to read articles in Spanish when I want to is something no other reading app ever gave me without friction. This feature is not yet available to the public, I am still dogfooding it but will release it soon.

I built all of this because I needed it. And it works. I use PuraLetra every single day.

In March, I launched PuraLetra on Product Hunt.

I had done the preparation. I wrote the maker comment. I designed the promotional images. I drafted posts for LinkedIn, Threads, and X. I picked the launch day, set the alarm, and posted at 12:01 AM Pacific.

Then I watched.

No upvotes. No signups. No traffic. The Product Hunt page sat there like a storefront on a street nobody walks down. I refreshed the analytics a few times, then a few more, then I stopped refreshing because the number wasn't going to change by looking at it harder. My family gracefully upvoted it and signed up for it, but no one else did.

I have a handful of free accounts, mostly from people I know. No paying subscribers.

Here is the part where, if I were writing a different kind of newsletter, I would tell you what I learned. I would package the failure into a framework. Five things I'd do differently. How to launch on Product Hunt the right way. A redemption arc where the failure becomes the setup for a smarter second act.

I don't have that. Not yet.

What I have is a product I built with my own hands and an AI tool, that solves a real problem I actually have, that I use every single day, and that I haven't figured out how to get in front of the people who might need it too.

That is a strange place to sit. It is not the same as the projects in my graveyard, the ones I wrote about in essay two. Those I abandoned before they were real. PuraLetra is real. It works. The code runs. The weekly digest lands in my inbox every Tuesday. The articles are clean and readable. The highlights are there when I go back to them.

I built the thing. The thing is good. And the market said nothing.

I keep coming back to something. In the first essay I wrote for this series, I said the only thing I had been consistent at for years was writing. PuraLetra might be the second. I have used it every day since September. I am not tired of it. I am not looking for the next idea. I am still adding features because I keep finding things I want it to do.

Maybe that is worth something, even if the Product Hunt launch says otherwise. Maybe the product that survives is the one you build because you need it, not because a launch strategy told you to.

I don't know yet. I will let you know when I do.

If you want to try it, it is at puraletra.com. It is free. You don't need to upvote anything.

This is essay six of Building My Way Out, a weekly series about one engineer's attempt to build a life beyond employment.

My dad had surgery last week, so I flew to Mexico to help out. One night after my parents went to bed, I made a cup of tea, sat down at the kitchen table, and opened a spreadsheet I built months ago. The house was quiet. I had been putting this off for a while, but something about being there made it harder to keep avoiding. Watching your parents get older does something to how you think about time. If we're lucky, we all get there. And if we all get there, the question I've been circling in this series stops being abstract. How many working years do I have left, and how do I want to spend them?

The spreadsheet has my income, my expenses, my debt, and a formula at the bottom that answers one question: how much independent income do I need before I can walk away from my salary? I've opened it maybe three times since I built it. Each time I closed it faster than the time before. This time I made myself sit with it.

I want to share what I found. Not as advice. As the honest math of one person's situation.

I earn well into six figures. I've mentioned before that I earn good money. By most standards, it is. By the standards of someone carrying significant debt, living in one of the most expensive metro areas in the country, and supporting a household, it moves fast.

About a third of my take-home goes to housing. Another 13% goes to debt payments. Between utilities, insurance, food, transportation, and everything else that keeps a life running, about two-thirds of my income is committed before I make a discretionary choice.

That leaves a third. On paper, a third of a good salary sounds like plenty of room. But that third is supposed to cover retirement savings, investments, travel, the occasional thing that makes life more than a spreadsheet, and if I'm serious about this project, the runway to eventually replace my salary. The amount actually available to build toward leaving is a fraction of what's left over.

I have reasons for living where I live. The debt is real and already structured on the best terms I could get. These aren't luxuries. They're the cost of the life my wife and I have built over the years. I'm not trying to optimize a spreadsheet. I'm trying to build inside the constraints that actually exist.

So what does the exit number look like?

If I need to replace 70% of my current income to maintain something close to stability, not luxury, the target is somewhere between $140,000 and $150,000 per year. But that's before self-employment taxes and before health insurance.

Health insurance is the number nobody talks about until they have to. I've looked at marketplace plans for my area. For comparable coverage to what I have now through my employer, I'd be paying around $1,000 per month. Add self-employment taxes on top of that, and the real exit number climbs to roughly $175,000 to $180,000 per year. Around $15,000 per month.

I stared at that number for a long time. Fifteen thousand dollars a month, every month, before I can consider walking away from a paycheck. Sitting in my parents' kitchen in the city where I grew up, that number felt like it belonged to someone else's life. But it doesn't. It's mine.

A single product at $5/month needs about 3,000 paying users to cover that. That's not a side project. That's a business. At $10/month, it's roughly 1,500. At $50/month, about 300. Three or four smaller products, each generating $30K to $45K per year, is more realistic in some ways, but it means building and maintaining multiple products while working full-time. The income math might be friendlier, but the time math gets harder.

I built a section in the spreadsheet for this. Different price points, different numbers of paying users. Seeing it laid out made the scale real in a way that thinking about it never did.

One of those products already exists. It's live, it has users, and it charges $5 a month. I'll write about it soon.

The other thing the spreadsheet made clear is the timeline.

I've been in tech long enough to be realistic about how long it takes to build a product, find users, and reach meaningful revenue. I'm not looking at a six-month sprint. I'm looking at two to three years of building while employed, growing income gradually, and hitting a crossover point where the independent income is reliable enough to absorb the loss of a salary.

Two to three years. That's not discouraging. It's just real. And knowing it is better than the vague sense that "someday I'll figure it out," which is what keeps people in the comfortable enough trap I wrote about a few weeks ago.

I'm treating the spreadsheet as a direction, not a plan. It tells me roughly how far I need to go. The specific path will be messy and full of things I can't predict. But what the numbers gave me this week is something I didn't have before: a concrete answer to "what am I building toward?" Not a feeling. A number, a timeline, and a gap I need to close.

The gap is large. But it's a gap I can measure, which means it's a gap I can work on.

The spreadsheet is still open on my laptop. I haven't closed it this time.

This essay is part of Building My Way Out — a weekly series about one engineer's attempt to build a life beyond employment.

In 1999, I was setting up Windows NT workstations in an office in Minnesota. I had taught myself enough networking to get hired, and I spent my days creating user accounts, running cable, and troubleshooting scanners (we were a document scanning shop). The internet existed, but it wasn't something we used for our jobs. My job was the local network and the high-speed scanners. That was the whole world.

A few years later, the web swallowed everything. The company didn't need someone to maintain a LAN as much as they needed someone who understood how things worked over HTTP. I saw this happening and started reading. Then building. This is when I bought Visual Studio 6.0 Professional Edition, it came in a box. I convinced the shop owner to let me build a web app with it, and after several months and lots of learning, I had a web app which we called iDoc. It allowed our clients to access their scanned documents from anywhere, before this, they could only access their scanned documents by browsing files in a DVD.

Then I moved to Texas with no job and talked my way into a programming role because I could demonstrate that I'd built things on my own. It wasn't easy, I spent a month in Austin, TX living in a motel alone while applying to new jobs daily, spending my entire days looking and submitting new applications, and then failing countless interviews. But about a month later, I got a programming job. That shift from local networks to web applications remade my career completely. Not because I planned it, but because I paid attention, spent time learning it, and built something while the window was open.

The second shift was cloud. I was already a developer by then, working in .NET, writing SQL, building internal tools. When AWS and Azure started making infrastructure something you configured instead of purchased, the economics of building changed overnight. A solo developer could deploy something that used to require a sysadmin, a server room, and a procurement process. I watched entire teams get restructured around this. I also watched individual developers suddenly have leverage they never had before.

The third was mobile. I only built one mobile app (iTranslate), which helped me pay for a new laptop but it quickly got outdated and other apps took over. My time was spent building the APIs and backends that fed these mobile apps. The pattern was the same: a new surface area appeared, the barrier to reaching users dropped, and for a brief window, small teams and solo builders could compete with companies that had hundreds of engineers. Then the platforms matured, the app stores got crowded, and the window narrowed. It didn't close, but the advantage of being early faded.

Each of these shifts had something in common. For a period of time, the tools were new enough that experience mattered less than willingness to learn. The playing field flattened. A solo developer with curiosity could build something real, ship it, and reach people directly. Then, over time, the ecosystem professionalized, the platforms consolidated, and the advantage shifted back toward scale.

I've been through this cycle three times now. And I recognize the pattern because I'm watching it happen again.

AI is the fourth shift, and it's different in a way that matters to me specifically. The previous shifts changed where software ran or how it was delivered. AI is changing what a single person can build. The gap between what I can do alone and what used to require a team has never been smaller.

I use AI tools in my daily work now. I've used them to prototype ideas in hours that would have taken me weeks. I've used them to work through problems in languages and frameworks I don't know well. I've used them to find clarity on large code bases that would have taken years to understand. The speed is real. But speed isn't the part that changed my thinking.

What changed my thinking is scope. A solo developer in 2026 can build, deploy, and maintain software that would have required three or four people in 2018. Not because the developer is better, but because the tools absorbed the work that used to belong to other roles. Design, copywriting, testing, deployment, even parts of product thinking. The leverage is unprecedented, and it's still early.

For someone trying to build independently, trying to build a way out, this is the most favorable environment I've seen in 25 years of watching these shifts. And I don't say that with startup optimism. I say it as someone who has been through the cycle enough times to know that the window doesn't stay open forever.

There's a risk in writing about AI. It invites the breathless hype that makes most AI content unreadable. I'm not interested in that. What I'm interested in is the practical reality: I am a 52-year-old engineer with decades of experience and a finite amount of time outside my day job. AI makes that finite time more productive than it has ever been. That's not hype. That's my Tuesday night.

The previous shifts required me to retool. Learn a new stack. Move to a new city. Start from the bottom of a different ladder. This one doesn't. It amplifies what I already know. My experience with databases, systems architecture, and backend development isn't made obsolete by AI. It's made more valuable, because I can now build on top of it faster and reach further.

I also know from experience that the window has a half-life. The early period of any technology shift is chaotic, full of opportunity, and forgiving of imperfection. The late period is optimized, competitive, and rewards capital over creativity. We're still in the early period for AI. I don't know how long it lasts. But I know I've watched this movie before, and the people who built during the early window are the ones who had something when it closed.

I'm not going to pretend I have a grand AI-powered product in the works. What I have is the recognition that right now, for the first time in my career, the conditions for building independently are better than the conditions for waiting. Every previous shift, I adapted within employment. This time, I also want to use it to build something of my own.

This essay is an example. The stories and observations are mine. I've lived them. But I used AI to help me organize and structure my thoughts. That's the leverage I'm talking about.

Writing isn't the only thing I'm building. But that's a story for a future essay.

That's what this series is about. Not AI. Not technology trends. The question of whether one engineer, late in his career, with real constraints and a real paycheck, can use this particular window to build something that lasts beyond his employment.

The window is open. I've seen enough of them to know what happens next.

This essay is part of an ongoing series. Read all entries →

Last week, my team was alerted about an error showing up across all of our testing environments. We were concerned. This could be a new bug about to reach production. I dug into the logs, traced the problem to a new feature behind a toggle, and we turned the toggle off before deploying. Crisis handled. Everyone was at peace.

Later that day, a colleague picked up the bug ticket I'd created. He ran into trouble testing the fix, so we looked at the code together. It was a tricky problem, something subtle in how the feature interacted with existing logic. After debugging it, I was able to show him exactly what was causing the issue. That unblocked him, and I went back to my own work.

A few hours later I closed my laptop feeling good. Accomplished. Later, on one of my usual walks after dinner, the thought came back again: How many more years before I own my time?

I reached a place in my career where I get to enjoy many benefits beyond a paycheck. This took decades of career pivots to reach: manufacturing, LAN engineering, programming. Walking away feels like walking away from half of my life's work. At my age and with 11 years at one company, there are many compounding benefits: salary growth, institutional knowledge, the kind of trust that takes years to build. All of this adds up to a life of comfort that I worked hard to obtain. This is what people call the golden handcuffs, and I've come to realize that mine aren't made of pain and suffering. They're made of comfort. That's why they work.

For the first two decades of my professional life, leaving a job was a binary decision. If I didn't like my job, I'd find a new one. I knew time was currency, and at the time I had plenty. I ran into many barriers along the way. Not knowing the language, not having experience or diplomas. But the truth is that if I spent enough time searching and applying, eventually I'd find a job.

Today there is a third option I need to consider. It's no longer between liking my job or not liking it. The third answer is: "Yes, I like my job. And I need something else." Not because what I have is broken, but because something in me is asking for more control over my time, my output, my direction. And with fewer years of professional work ahead of me than behind me, the bet on something that is "fine" starts to feel like something I'm running out of time to settle for.

This isn't a midlife crisis. A midlife crisis is buying a sports car or a facelift. This is a midlife calculation.

For more than a few decades, I've spent my career optimizing systems: databases, architectures, processes. It's no surprise to me that this mental model is now seeping into how I think about my life. I want the highest return on my investment. I want to minimize the time I spend doing something that's just fine.

But optimization assumes that you've defined the right objective function, and that's something I think I'm close to defining. The responsible career professional in me says: stay put. If my goal is to maximize lifetime earnings, staying is the obvious choice. If my goal is to maximize time under my control before I run out of years, the math changes entirely. At my age, the denominator is shrinking whether I optimize or not.

In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami describes his path to becoming a novelist. He sold his profitable jazz bar to write. His friends told him he was irrational, but his answer was about commitment, not calculation. I've learned that some decisions aren't optimization problems. They're identity questions, the kind that don't resolve in spreadsheets. The tools that have served me well in my career are the same ones that can mislead me about my life at this stage. I need to define what I want, and be aware that the optimal choice might not be the right one.

I'm not quitting. I'm not making a dramatic move. I'm doing something harder: building in parallel. Keeping the job that funds my life while carving out the hours to build something that might eventually fund a different one. The paradox of "comfortable enough" is that it gives you the runway to build, but also every reason not to.

Most weeks, the building happens in the margins. Early mornings, evenings, weekends. That's not inspirational. It's just true. And it's the reality for anyone else in this position.

Finishing my walk around Bellevue's downtown park, I watched the ducks flapping on the water, dogs walking with their humans, a sunset fading above the buildings. It was a good day. And the question was still there as I turned toward home. I think it's supposed to be. Maybe the question is the engine — the thing that keeps me building, keeps me writing, keeps me showing up here every Friday.

How many more years before I own my time?

This essay is part of an ongoing series. Read all entries →

I've been thinking about getting additional storage to have at home to store our media: photos, videos, audios, etc. Combined, my wife and I have dozens of terabytes, and it is currently spread across multiple external hard drives (SSDs) and across clouds (iCloud, OneDrive, and Google Drive). As part of my research to get the right amount of storage for this network attached storage (NAS) device, I did an inventory of our media. This is how I ran across an old folder from a backup on my previous laptop. This folder contained multiple projects, all abandoned in one way or another. Of all of those, only two remain active, this website and TodoTax.com.

Throughout the years I've started several projects, some of them I ran for years, and they were moderately successful. Others, not so much, or maybe I just didn't stick with them long enough — I'd never know.

In my first essay I said I was going to build my way out. What I didn't say was how many times I've tried before.

For example, I ran a meetup called the Co-Founders Meetup, where the goal was to reunite people with ideas and a business sense with people with technical knowledge. These meetups were successful if we consider attendance and participation a metric for success. The meetup attracted over a hundred people since the first meeting, and it was for the most part a good balance between business people, software engineers and designers, recruiters, and angel investors. I wasn't following my passion, I was doing what everyone else was doing with the hopes of starting the next big thing. When I moved on from this meetup, it had over 3,000 members.

From this meetup another project was born, The TechMap. The idea was to bring the same type of individuals and connections online. A place for people to share their startups and themselves, with the idea that they could connect and help each other. The map itself was a welcome feature, a lot of people really liked it and many people and businesses signed up.

Another project I spent some time on was Developer Stash, a list of curated tools and resources for programmers and people interested in software development.

Moving my domain names from Google to Porkbun also forced me to see a list of all my domain names, which unsurprisingly, there are many. For years, the first thing I did after thinking of an idea was to get a domain name for it. I know some of you can relate to this.

There are many more projects, I am thinking of adding a graveyard page to my site and list them all, with descriptions, URLs, etc.

Every single one of these projects had a goal, they were the thing that would get me out at different times in my life. I chose them because they seemed like good business ideas, not because I couldn't stop doing them, none of them were really a passion of mine, and perhaps, that was part of the problem. I picked projects thinking they would generate income, not projects I was already happily doing for free, for fun. I see now that the only thing I continued doing, consistently through the years, was writing. Never with the expectation of earning money, but using it sometimes with the idea to promote what I was building.

My professional life took off while I was in Austin, TX, and being surrounded by so many people building and wanting to build things was contagious.

My passion since I can remember has been going to new places, capturing them with photographs, write little programs that are helpful for me, and creating web apps that I wish existed. I wasn't doing any of this, and although I am not suggesting you should follow your passion, the truth is that I didn't and this probably contributed to me not sticking to any of my projects, especially when they weren't bringing money right away. However, I started writing in my blog around this time when I moved to Texas from Minnesota, and I haven't stopped since. The data said: you write. Everything else, you abandon.

Writing is for me like walking or taking photographs. I enjoy doing it, I feel better when I do it, and it has never occurred to me I can make real money from it. I've gotten paid before for writing and photography, but it was nothing planned, I stumbled upon a few opportunities and I took them. For example, back in 2005, I was reading a now defunct programming magazine (asp.netPRO), and decided to write to the editor about a better description and example for an article. To my surprise, someone responded to my email and asked me if I could write a similar article myself about a different topic, I responded with a draft, and after some suggestions to make it fit their guidelines they accepted it. I didn't know what that meant at the time, until I got a check in the mail for $500. After that I submitted two more articles and they were also published in the magazine, each paid $500, which for me was a lot of money and couldn't believe someone was paying me to write about programming! I stopped. I don't have a good reason. But I kept writing on my blog — for free, for no one.

I am taking writing seriously now. For years I used it to promote whatever project I was excited about that month. This time the writing isn't the marketing, it's the work. What I'm trying, what's working, what's failing, shared candidly as it happens. I don't know where this leads yet, and that's okay. The point is the documentation, not the conclusion.

I don't see my list of past projects as failures. They're the data set that got me here — and the data finally said something clear enough to act on.

This essay is part of an ongoing series. Read all entries →

I am writing on a Thursday night, overlooking the lights of downtown Bellevue. It's raining, and although it's not that late, the sun has already set. For years, my writing happened on Friday mornings. That was my favorite perk from working Monday through Thursday — a three-day weekend, every week. Fridays had become my day: walking, stopping at random coffee shops, having lunch at Pike Place, taking photos around the water front, reading and writing. The company I work for decided that everyone should be available five days a week. So they took my Fridays back.

Since then, I've been thinking more carefully about time, about who controls it, and what it would take to get more of it back for good.

I like my job. It's challenging, and I still learn from it every week. That's why I'm still there, eleven years in. I earn good money, I have great coworkers, and I believe in what we're building. And yet, I need to build something outside of it. I need more control over my time, and this feeling gets stronger every year. I think that's what aging does — it makes you want to spend more of your days on things that are actually yours.

I didn't start here. My first job in this country was on an assembly line in Minnesota, attaching the same piece to an endless stream of treadmills rolling past on a moving belt. Tiring, repetitive, physical. The pay was around $5.50 an hour on 12-hour shifts. After that I sprayed kitchen doors and cabinets, also on a line, 6 PM to 6 AM. I remember waking up in the morning unable to move my fingers. A few jobs like that, until my English improved enough to get an office job. Better conditions, similar pay, but being around English speakers helped me learn faster. Also, I got to drink coffee while I worked, and that, believe me, was where my love for coffee originated.

Eventually I got bored of simple clerk work and started reading programming books, then networking books, then enrolled at a community college to study computer science. A few years later I landed an entry-level LAN engineering job, setting up computers, creating accounts, keeping systems running. I did that for about five years, then moved to Texas without a job lined up, applied everywhere in Austin, and after about a month of daily interviews, got my first programming offer. It paid double my previous salary. The commute was nearly two hours each way. After three months of four-hour commute days I found something closer, stayed there until 2008, when the financial crisis cleared out the entire development team. I landed on my feet. I always have. Curiosity and a decent work ethic have been enough. But I want something different now. I don't want to spend the majority of my days working for someone else. I want something that's mine, something that fits this phase of my life.

The obstacle is the math. My salary is comfortable — until you run the numbers. I carry significant student debt, and rent in this city takes a real bite. I invest in retirement, I travel, and buy a lot of books. The "just save and retire" math doesn't work from where I'm standing, and I knew that going in.

What I'm not going to do: consulting or services. Trading one boss for twelve, hours for dollars, no leverage. I'm also not building courses. Technology moves too fast and I'm not interested in selling knowledge that expires in six months. And I'm not writing a book to retire on — I love writing, but I'm a realist.

What I am going to do is write about this process as it happens. Real experiments. Real numbers, in ranges where I can. Real failures. I'm not going to tell you how to build your way out. What I can do is bring you along while I figure it out.

The one thing I know: writing is the only thing I've done consistently for years, across every abandoned project, through long stretches when nobody was reading. That consistency has to mean something. I'm taking it seriously for the first time, not as a marketing channel for something else, but as the thing itself.

This newsletter is not advice, and it's not a playbook. It's a real-time account of one employed engineer trying to build his exit, the false starts, the financial math, the uncomfortable reality of doing both at once.

One essay per week. I'll write about what I tried, what I'm thinking, what the numbers say, and what it feels like when progress is slow. Some weeks will be about money. Some weeks will be about the craft of building. Some weeks will just be about what it's like to sit with the uncertainty.

If this sounds like a story you want to follow, I'll be here every Friday.

This essay is part of an ongoing series. Read all entries →

No hay nada más verdadero y puro que lo que piensas. Lo que haces es un resultado filtrado, convenientemente pensado antes de hacerlo, basado en nuestros miedos y deseo de lograr algo. ¿A qué me refiero? Pues cuando pensamos lo hacemos en privado, no hay filtro, es puro, y es genuinamente quienes somos.

Cuando hacemos algo lo hacemos sabiendo cómo van a reaccionar otros, cómo nos va a afectar ya sea positiva o negativamente, etc. Entonces, ¿todos mentimos? ¿Somos falsos siempre? No exactamente, pero muy pocas veces creo yo que la mayoría de las personas muestran o actúan de acuerdo a quienes son y no por conveniencia.

Cuando era más joven no recuerdo pasar tanto tiempo en mi mente, no recuerdo tener estos pensamientos tan vívidos sobre cómo me siento, lo que pienso de lo que pasa a mi alrededor, etc. Creo que estoy más alerta a mis emociones y trato activamente de estar presente con mis emociones y el mundo a mi alrededor. Pero me veo articulando cosas en mi pensamiento y escogiendo qué decir o hacer después de esto, no actúo de sorpresa, al menos no mucho. No sé si esto es algo bueno o malo, creo que es interesante que soy más estratégico al hacer las cosas y actuar. ¿Probablemente es miedo al riesgo? ¿A decir lo que estoy pensando? Hay algo de eso. Sé que muchas veces no digo exactamente lo que pienso para evitar un problema, para no enojar a alguien que me importa, para no afectar mis finanzas, etc. ¿Es esto cobardía?

Mencioné que cuando uno piensa lo hace sin filtros pero no es totalmente verdad. La realidad es que aun nuestros pensamientos privados están determinados por nuestras experiencias, nuestros miedos, lo que creemos que es bien y mal, etc. ¿A lo mejor no es pensamientos y acción, sino pensamientos conscientes e inconscientes?

En este momento estoy pensando y después escribiendo, pero me doy cuenta de que lo que escribo es lo que estoy pensando pero basado en lo que pienso que debo de escribir, es consciente, no inconsciente.

Entonces, ¿es imposible ser realmente auténtico? ¿Pensar y actuar sin filtros, hacerlo de manera inconsciente? Esa es la pregunta que me estoy haciendo, y aun cuando no tengo respuesta, me doy cuenta de que puedo hacer algo con esta información.

Por ejemplo, a mí me gusta pensar que soy una persona honesta, justa, e introspectiva. Pero, ¿soy así inconscientemente también? ¿Cómo puedo saberlo? Probablemente nunca lo sabré. Lo que me doy cuenta es que es importante preguntarse a uno mismo por qué pensamos lo que pensamos, por qué hacemos lo que hacemos, y al menos, de vez en cuando, tratar de observar nuestras ideas y creencias, y considerar si hay otras opciones, otras ideas, otras formas diferentes a lo que pensamos primeramente. Quiero rascar más profundo, y escribiendo cosas como esto me ayuda ya que me obliga a pensar más a fondo y con más claridad que si lo hago solo en mi mente.

Leer es algo que me ayuda a entender y a descubrir cosas que puedo pensar pero que no son muy claras para mí. Y la manera en que aplico el entendimiento que logro con la lectura es escribiéndolo. Este ensayo es prueba de ese ejercicio. Una de las cosas que empecé a hacer el año pasado es leer un poco más sobre filosofía. No creo encontrar respuestas directas a mis preguntas, pero sí espero ver pensamientos similares o cuando menos encontrar una guía que me ayude a mejorar mi mente consciente para poder llegar a ser lo que imagino que quiero ser. También me trae más calma y a lo mejor hasta una felicidad saber que hay cosas más profundas y similares que otras personas han pensado desde hace cientos de años y aun cuando no lograron encontrar muchas respuestas, lograron hacer algo que en su mente era bueno con sus pensamientos.

Mi meta no es ser un filósofo, pero sí entender más y saber qué hacer con mis pensamientos e ideas, hacer algo más que solo tenerlas en mi mente, consciente o inconsciente. Poner en acción estos pensamientos, tratar de mejorar mi manera de interactuar con la gente a mi alrededor, y escribir. Estos son ejercicios para clarificar lo que pienso, y es algo que me ayuda a acercarme a una respuesta que probablemente no existe.

The tools we use every day—Google, Microsoft, the defaults—aren't free. We pay with our data, our attention, and our trust. But we have other options.

I was attending college in Minnesota when I first heard about Google. A simple web page with a single text box and a button. Before that, I used Lycos and Ask Jeeves.

Google’s home page was a statement, it was there only to help you find what you were looking for and it promised to do it fast and accurately, without spamming you with graphics and Ads to other websites. Remember the phrase “Don’t be evil”? The phrase originated from the 2004 IPO prospectus and was a staple of the company's code of conduct, emphasizing that ads should be clearly labeled and not influence search results. I think we can all agree that this is not their philosophy anymore.

What changed? Enshittification. They stopped serving users and started serving advertisers. Little by little, I have been trying to move away from big tech’s software, as I’ve been trying to have more control of my websites, the applications I use, and my own data. The enshittification of these wonderful services from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Etc. is a reality, and it’s pushing people like me and many others to try alternatives.

WordPress to Ghost

One of the big changes for me was switching from hosting my personal site (the website you are reading now) in WordPress.com to a self-hosted Ghost instance. I rent a virtual machine on DigitalOcean, and installed a Ghost instance in it. I don’t have to pay a subscription to gain access to features or have the limitations that WordPress impose depending on your subscription type. I can install anything I want, and run it as I wish, it’s my personal server and website on the internet.

Google Domains to Porkbun

Like many people working in tech, I have a long list of domain names I’ve acquired over the years. This is the result of thinking of ideas, and buying domain names that will host these ideas, with the thinking that they could become something one day. All my domain names were hosted by Namesecure many years ago, but as soon as Google offered domain name hosting, I switched to them, I trusted them. However, on June 2023, Google announced that they were going to stop offering this service, so after looking for options, I landed on Porkbun.com — which I learned about from reading Derek Sivers’ Tech Independence post, which I highly recommend. Porkbun is an independent domain name registrar company based in Oregon, and so far, it’s been a great place to register and host my domain names.

Gmail to Fastmail

This is also the reason why years ago I started paying for email. I’ve always had free email accounts, first with Hotmail (which became Outlook), then Yahoo, and the Gmail. But the truth is that this service isn’t free, if you are not paying for it, then your data is likely to be part of the products they sell to advertisers. I haven’t completely switched to my paid email provider, but I am close to it. I got a few email accounts with Fastmail and little by little, I’m replacing my Gmail accounts with the ones in Fastmail.

Google Workspace to LibreOffice

Then we have Google Docs and Sheets. Many years ago I started tinkering with Linux, and this brought me to an open source Office Suite called Libre Office. This is free open source software that you can use to replace MS Word, Google Docs, MS Excel, Google Sheets, MS PowerPoint, etc. It is a full office suite, and it’s compatible with documents created in the MS Office suite or Google’s.

I am not preaching, these are just the choices I’ve made. You have choices too.

What I use now:

• Website: Ghost (self-hosted in DigitalOcean)
• Domains: Porkbun
• Email: Fastmail
• Office: LibreOffice

Today’s default options aren't the only option. And the price of 'free' is higher than it looks.