I didn't plan to write this much in 2025.
It started in late summer, drafting a book on a theme I'd been turning over in my mind for years. One I kept coming back to.
In the fall, it became an essay a day, sometimes two.
Most of them aren't about anything impressive. A spreadsheet from my waitering days. A VBA book dropped on my desk in 2007. A professor who walked into my classroom with a stack of flyers. LED lights still sitting in my dad's basement.
Small moments. Crumpled paper.
The lessons that stuck with me weren't the big ones. They were the quiet observations. The problems worth solving rarely announce themselves. They hide in support tickets, in workarounds, in the thing your customer says right before they hang up. In the spreadsheet I didn't build.
Most of what I know, I learned by trying things that didn't work. Boxes of unsold Christmas lights. A student database no one adopted. A matching engine that needed a network effect we couldn't create.
I'm not sure why the words came so easily this fall. Maybe it's that my kids are getting older, and I'm realizing how fast time moves. Maybe it's that I've been building products long enough to see the patterns repeat.
Or maybe I finally stopped waiting to have something important to say and started writing about what I actually know: the small moments that seemed forgettable at the time but shaped everything after.
If you read any of them this year, thank you. If you didn't, that's fine too.
I wrote them mostly for myself and my kids. To remember the crumpled papers before I forget why they mattered.