My piece of the internet
Like outer space, the internet is forever expanding. A lot of what I produce to the internet is naturally owned by my employer and I’ve been recently craving something that I can put out there that is solely mine. That’s how this site became to be. I am not sure exactly what I will do with it but today is Sep 21st, 2026 and I thought it would be fun to write out what I hope for and in sometime from now I can look back at this and see what it came to be (or didn’t).
My first goal of this site is to create a place for me to share my thoughts on the tech industry, career development or generally software engineering. Over the last few years I’ve taken on this new role of “Head of Engineering”. I joke with some of my friends that I want to transition to only being a “thought leader” (someone who only contributes or leads via thinking) and though I joke about it, there is some validity to it. In this position, coding a small feature doesn’t drive meaningful impact to the business. Driving organizational change, hiring, and generally growing others has the largest impact. Going back to this site, writing out my thoughts on trends, tools etc will force me to really form a strong opinion and I believe help me be a leader in this industry.
The next goal related to career development is forcing myself to reflect more often. Every so often, let’s say each year it would be great to openly reflect on that year. See where I’ve progressed, what I’ve learned and what I want to learn. Somewhat related, I want to build out a Engineering leadership “playbook” comprising of everything I learn along the way to share with others and reinforce good patterns I’ve picked up.
At work I share a lot of links to interesting reads in Slack, from places such as hackernews, reddit, X etc. Similar to how a lot of people have a “good reads” section, I want to have some place to share interesting articles that I’ve read for my friends and create an archive to reference later. Sort of like a curated subreddit of approved posts by me. Would be cool if that was an RSS feed.
A lesser goal would be to share other thoughts and content, maybe around travel or working out. For those who know me in real life, I am a heavy calorie tracking app user and have been working out for a few years. I somewhat pride myself on a few lifestyle habbits such as falling asleep by 10:20pm and hitting my macros everyday. I am going to Italy in 3 weeks from now and part of me thinks writing about my Italy trip would be cool simply for myself later in life.
Communication has never been exactly my strong suite. I tend to mumble and ramble. While writing this type of content out won’t improve my speech, it can help me be concise and specific when I talk.
That’s it for now, we’ll see where this takes me. I’ve owned hayden.dev for many years now, so at least I have something to point it too.