I am writing this from a hammock.
Not metaphorically. I've been spending more and more of my time away from screens, trying to remember what thinking feels like without a notification interrupting every four minutes. I have a Remarkable tablet now. E-ink, no Chrome tabs, no Slack unread count haunting me from my peripheral vision. I read on it. I take notes on it. It is, embarrassingly, one of the better decisions I've made in the last few years.
This writing started there. Not as any sort of content strategy, but as a quiet place to muse.
I have a sociology and psychology background that I use every single day, which often surprises people to learn since I'm an engineering manager. The path wasn't linear. I graduated into a bare job market, picked up where I left off the previous summers at the NC Department of Transportation, doing everything from data entry to assisting with fatal crash investigations (you know, normal job stuff). I eventually ran into an old friend at a poker game, someone I hadn't seen in years, who needed someone he could trust on a two-man dev team after his partner abruptly left the company. That conversation landed me at an agency for nearly a decade doing website optimization, A/B testing, and personalization. Which is, when you think about it, the applied science of understanding how humans make decisions and designing systems that help people get where they're trying to go. The sociology degree wasn't a detour. It was the whole point.
