// writing
Writing
Notes from a self-taught engineer — enterprise software, async Rust, Bitcoin, and learning in public.
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Confidence Is Not a Prerequisite
Stop asking if you're senior enough to move. Seniority is impact and ownership, not a feeling that arrives one day. Confidence lags competence — look at the work.
self-taughtcareersenioritygrowthlearning-in-public -
The Best Hours Go to the Job
How do you combine a full-time Java job with learning Rust and building things on the side? The honest answer is that you don't balance it — the job takes your best hours, the side work crawls, and the only reason any of it survives is that it's all the same habit.
rustjavalearning-in-publicself-taughtcareerside-projects -
The First Symptom
A client's calls were coming back 404, and I was already sure I knew why. I was wrong. The story of an incident I watched more senior people solve — and the two-part map of the gap between us it left me with.
incident-responsedebuggingkubernetescachingakamaiseniorityself-taught -
What Spring Was Doing For Me All Along
I tried to learn Rust by porting a service I actually maintain — and found out how much of my Java career a framework had been quietly handling. A story about ownership, singletons, routes, and a compiler that made me do the work by hand.
rustjavaspringlearning-in-publicownershipself-taught -
The Same Pipeline, a Year Later
Last year I built an end-to-end test pipeline by breaking it. This year I deleted half of it. The story of moving a multi-service E2E suite off Kubernetes and onto Testcontainers — and what the diff says about who I've become.
testingtestcontainerskuberneteskafkaci-cdjava -
From The Odin Project to 100+ Microservices
What no tutorial taught me about enterprise software — told through the first real thing I owned: an end-to-end CI pipeline I built by breaking it, over and over.
self-taughtcareerci-cdjenkinskubernetestesting