Hello, nerds.

I'm Mike. I taught high school physics for seven years, then spent the last 8 building software — currently backend and distributed systems. The first job was watching other people learn hard things. The second one is being the person struggling, which is a different view of the same problem.

So that's what this is. Not tutorials. Notes on what it's actually like to learn this stuff as a working adult with a mortgage and a kid — the career decisions, the plateaus, the way a technical problem and a personal one sometimes have the same shape. Consistency, partial failure, and knowing what you can safely retry are not exclusively distributed systems concepts.

Some of it is polished. Most of it isn't, and that's the point — if it had to be finished, I'd never post.