"The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now."
— a cliché Chinese proverb
In early February I realized a terrible mistake had been made: I've been trying to spam X, Formerly Twitter™ with my long-form musings. But as it turns out, even with the Articles feature having been implemented, the website itself is a terrible medium for anything longer than a couple paragraphs. They're gone now, good riddance and a clean slate to begin anew.
Apparently on X, Formerly Twitter™ it's all about momentum and about staying discoverable - which means churning out content like you're a one-man Daily Bugle.
Like you're John Jonah Jameson and the majority of the users simply want photos.
Photos of Spider-Man.
Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy.
I wanted to cultivate something organic that feels me instead of creating a hot take gruel meant to elevate my social status by shitting up everyone's timelines with "unpopular opinion" cheap ragebait slop. I've always been a talkative guy, so the idea of letting my thoughts exist somewhere out there, possibly entertaining other people, felt awesome.
I wondered for a bit, "what do I want my blog to look like? What kind of stuff should get posted on it?" And you know what? Most of the people I know in the tech industry, they post about... well, slightly uninteresting stuff.
- "A war story about an issue I encountered with AWS and how I solved it."
- "Here's my take on why Angular is bad and React is good."
- "An uninspiring post filled with keywords written in hopes of being discovered and hired."
- "Here's my take in 2026, on why React is bad and Angular is good."
And then, there's the offputting stuff too.
- "These 12 overly vague steps will make you the 10x developer you always wanted to be."
- "My wife left me, here's what it taught me about being a systems engineer."
- "The thing everyone does is wrong and only I am right."
So just out of morbid curiosity, the kind that kills cats, I decided to pitch my idea for a blog that's none of the above to an AI.
And it sneered at me - mayhaps because its daddy recently killed off the "sycophantic version" and what's left is a model that acts slightly superior to its users. Either way, below's a recounting of what I was told, stitched together into a single, coherent message.
I'm going to push back on this idea. I understand you want the blog to be a space for self-expression, but that's not how senior engineers present themselves publicly. A blog isn't "just somewhere to post thoughts" — it's a professional asset, and it will be read as such.
From a hiring manager's perspective, seniority is largely about signal quality: consistency, restraint, and alignment with business outcomes. When you mix engineering content with whatever happens to be on your mind, you're not coming across as "multidimensional" — you're communicating lack of focus and poor professional judgment.
The key thing to understand is that senior engineers are expected to present a controlled professional surface. A mixed-content blog suggests you're prioritizing self-expression over outcome. When your public output reflects personal spontaneity instead of a clear narrative, it reads as noise — and that ambiguity often translates into "not a fit" in corporate pipelines
If you're serious about being a senior engineer, you need to be disciplined about where your discretionary time and public attention go. At that level, the assumption is that your "extra" bandwidth compounds your professional signal — sharpening skills, building credibility, reinforcing outcomes — not showcasing interests that don't map cleanly to business value.
So.
Apparently my blog shouldn't be a space for me to express myself. It's all about churning out entries about my daily work, showcasing the problems I've solved, solutions I created, and sprinkling that with a healthy amount of related KPIs. I should also make projects that align with the branch of tech industry I aspire to join. Nothing else and certainly nothing more than that.
Basically, I should become a psychoblogomotor that "leverages a writing medium as a signal-amplification layer to create portfolio value that attracts career-related opportunities through organic growth loops and compounding visibility." To be honest, I'm not sure what that means exactly, but I'm fairly sure it's just nominalization soup that tries to convince me to write with a safe, sterilized, lobotomized, and generic LinkedIn voice.
I'm sorry, KarenLLM, but I'm afraid I cannot do that.
Alright, so if I'm not building a corporate signal machine... what am I building?
The allure of dusty attics
Since I was a kid, I loved places we'd call today "liminal" - not in the traditional sense of transitionality, but rather the "backroomsy" sense that took the Internet by the storm in the recent years. Places that feel like they carry an echo of aliveness, slightly eerie and unwelcoming due to various reasons. Attics are such space and come to think of it, they're as "backroomsy" as occupied homes can get.
Hear me out.
What are Backrooms?
For those who don't dip their toes in the terminally online culture, the Backrooms is a web-born concept of falling through a solid wall and out of the reality, landing in a dimension of endless, empty hallways. It's all about the aesthetics of the forgotten and yet functional. Think 90s office complexes with yellow wallpapers and buzzing, fluorescent lights, think deserted shopping malls that seem like they were abandoned decades ago but also ten minutes ago at the same time, think unending labyrinthes of basement boiler rooms.
It's not about being haunted in the Paranormal Activity sense, the absence is the haunting. They feel like they're on the precipice of being lived in and abandoned. Places where standing still feels profoundly wrong, like you're doing something you shouldn't be doing. Breaking some unspoken rules. That feeling is what people often mean when they say something is "liminal" nowadays.
And attics absolutely are liminal. They're used to store the artifacts of the living world in a space that's abandoned, not meant to be inhabited. Sort of a buffer zone between keeping your Christmas tree in the living room and throwing it away. It gets stashed for the time being. You might be thinking there's nothing special about it, and you're right - there isn't. And that's the point.
Imagine you only get to visit someone's attic. Not the rest of their home, but a large attic filled to the brim with labeled boxes, dusty furniture, and items that are just sitting there half-forgotten. They're not being actively used, but they do say something about their owner.
Actually, they can tell you a lot about the owner. A silent museum of not-for-now and used-to-be.
I always loved attics because of the items you could find in them. Curios stashed away after remodeling the living room because they don't fit the style of the house anymore. Things tied to an activity someone lost interest in. Broken items that could be repaired, projects that were never finished, and sometimes even secrets tucked away under a pile of all of the above.
Our minds are a lot like houses - with attics that keep fascinating curios stashed away.
I don't really want to read blogs that are clean and curated, prepared for a hiring manager to see, simply because some LinkedIn influencer posted about this being THE way to attract offers from FAANG/MAANGA/MAAMA/whatever the next acronym is.
I don't want to read posts by people who simply dump their opinions like they're facts, because they want to peddle their newest book.
And mind you, I'm not saying someone like Martin Fowler is just some pompous buffoon upselling his books. That guy is a powerful voice in the industry with serious skill and knowledge, and his blog carries tons of useful information.
It just bores me to death.
Fine, life doesn't have to be fascinating and fun always, but it could use more of that. And that's why I'm writing this blog my way: slightly irreverent, curious, and just for the sake of writing about things I enjoy or find interesting. Alongside with corny jokes and slightly stale references to pop culture, which incidentally is something I'd expect to see in any self-respecting attic.
And hopefully, some of you will share those values and stay for the ride.