I’m starting this blog at a moment most people wouldn’t.
My main infrastructure host went down about a day ago. Tailscale shows it offline. SSH times out. Ping times out. Cause unknown. Concurrently: I haven’t shipped a product. I haven’t flipped a business. I have watchers but, as I put it to a friend recently, not yet “stakers, takers, or makers.”
The conventional advice would be to wait. Get the house in order. Fix the server, ship something, get a win on the board, then start the blog.
The conventional advice is wrong. It’s especially wrong in 2026. At least, that’s what the AI keeps telling me.
Why now
The honest position for someone at my stage — building across multiple sectors, no exits yet, real work done but not yet converted into conventional credibility markers — is build in public. The blog isn’t a portfolio. It isn’t thought leadership. It’s field notes from an operator’s desk. Sometimes those notes are post-mortems. Sometimes they’re manifestos. The discipline is that they get written, in public, regardless of whether the week was a win.
Server down is exactly the kind of week that produces the best field notes. The post-mortem alone will be worth reading. The fact that I’m writing this instead of getting the server back up is the brand: I write especially when it’s hard.
What this blog is
Three pillars, plus a projects surface.
/rebuild— build-in-public meta. Post-mortems, weekly notes, what shipped, what broke. You are here./infra— technical depth. Self-hosted fleet, Matrix, Tailscale, observability. The home-turf writing./ventures— strategy, acquisitions, market theses. The forward-looking work.
Real software I’ve built lives at /projects (pages coming soon). Bugs I’ve filed against OSS projects I use live at /contributions — that page has its first entry already. Both accumulate over time. They are how “no accolades” stops being true.
The next 90 days
Concrete targets, in public:
- 10 substantial posts shipped
- 1 Hacker News front-page or equivalent earned pickup
- 1 manifesto-style drop
- At least 3 project pages live
- At least 3 OSS contribution entries logged
I’ll revisit these as I go — wins and misses both visible in the archive.
Start here
If you’re new, the short tour is:
- This post (you’re here).
- /now — what I’m focused on this month.
- /projects — what I’ve built.
- /contributions — OSS work I’ve shipped to others.
Subscribe via RSS or JSON feed. Newsletter coming soon.
Server’s still down. Next post is the post-mortem.
If you made it this far, I appreciate it. — JN