My blog has been on hiatus for some time. I've not published a post since April 2022, which is nearly 3 years ago.

I have been writing steadily in the interim, but I didn't manage to write anything that I felt met the bar that I had established for myself on this site. One of the problems with continuous self improvement is that there are diminishing returns, and it takes more and more effort to "top" what you did last time.

Of course, there's an easy solution to that, which is simply to learn to stop worrying.

One complicating factor that led to this was that I was in a situation where I wasn't really able to write much about my work project, even tangentially.

While I didn't disclose anything too meaty when I was working on time series storage, there were always some general learnings, eg. about mmap, that came along with a low level performance critical system that were compelling to write about.

The project that I've been working on the past 3 years wasn't really like that, and my personal focus was much more on product impact.

Going forward, these reservations no longer apply. After over 10 years at Datadog, I left in June 2024.

It's taken me a little while to write about this, because if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. Now that it's 2025, I might as well take a crack at it.

I've made light of the pandemic era tendency for people to leave Google or Facebook after ~2-3 years, announcing that working there had been the fulfillment of a lifelong dream and that they were excited for the future.

I don't think this is really the same thing, but if you'll allow the hypocrisy, Datadog was a lifelong dream, although I never knew it would come in a form called Datadog, and I certainly never expected it would be so French.

I started when the company was at a stage where every engineer joined a single daily standup, with post-it notes placed on the glass walls of a room at least some of us called the magneto chamber. I helped build the product, the team, and the organization over those years, and I got to see it go public, to see it pass 50, 100, 500, 1000, 5000 employees, and to see a product that I led for ~3+ years reach $1bn in ARR.

I wasn't the most important part of that; not by a long shot; but I was an important part, and it's given me a level of professional fulfillment that I didn't realize was even available.

I didn't know this would be that kind of post when I started writing, but it's suitable context for the other topic I wanted to cover, which is that the nature of the content at this blog is going to change.

Writing is something that I love doing, so you can expect a publishing rate higher than once per 3 years going forward, but the focus on programming and technology is likely to expand to a wider breadth of topics that I'm passionate about.

For the foreseeable future, I will not be a practicing professional software engineer. My experience will not go anywhere, but time will dull my practical knowledge.

I've always been more than a programmer, and that's never been more true than now.

Jan 4