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.

I think the conventional advice is wrong, and I think 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:

  1. This post (you’re here).
  2. /now — what I’m focused on this month.
  3. /projects — what I’ve built.
  4. /contributions — OSS work I’ve shipped to others.

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Server’s still down. Next post is the post-mortem.