Still making things with my own hands

It’s a quiet hazard of seniority: you spend years orchestrating other people’s work and slowly lose the texture of the thing itself. I refuse to. I built this site by hand. I prototype the arguments I’d otherwise only put in a deck. In the last few months I’ve written Python services, Swift for an iPhone, Kotlin for Android theming experiments, and TypeScript for the web — not to be expert in all of them, but because staying close to the build is how I keep my taste honest.

You notice the friction a slide hides. You can tell a demo from a product because you’ve felt where the second one gets hard. And when I sit with engineers, I’m reasoning about the problem they’re actually in, not a manager’s cartoon of it.

Staying hands-on isn’t nostalgia for being an individual contributor. It’s how I keep the judgment that makes me useful as a leader calibrated to what’s true right now, instead of what was true the last time I built something myself.