It started like any other workday. In the evening, I checked my calendar for morning meetings. Standard Tuesday morning company standup followed by a meeting with my manager. The meeting with my manager was a bit odd, we just had a 1:1 a few days prior. But, it didn't raise any alarm bells, I thought it was a check-in on a project or some questions on how pieces of the platform worked.

"Companies typically wait until Friday for HR changes right? Or it happens overnight?" I thought in my head. I followed the regular evening routine, shower, get the kiddo ready for bed, get into bed myself and putz around on reddit.

The next morning, the company standup followed the same previous patterns. I went to my next meeting and joined Zoom and the first face to greet me was the head of HR.

"Shiiiiiiiit", I thought in my head. I've followed along the layoffs of other companies and guessed what was about to go down.

The position was terminated. The HR lead shared the terms of the layoff - which I think are reasonably generous for a series A startup. Paid until the end of the month then 4 weeks of severance, healthcare until end of next month. I dropped off Zoom, and tried to collect my thoughts. I turned up the music, closed my eyes, leaned back into my chair and took a few deep breaths.

I've been speaking with friends who have been laid off and many describe feeling disrespected. People spend so much time and effort at a company and overnight they're shown the door. No farewell with coworkers, just a termination email to their personal account. I didn't feel contempt for what happend, I think I felt a mix of relief and uncertainity. This was a forcing function to learn something new, to find new challenges.

There's probably a future blog post about what I think happened, but I want to focus this post on:

• What happend - Done ✔️
• Why Build A Blog
• What's Next

Why Build A Blog

I spent the next few days coming up with a strawman gameplan. Trying to figure out what I cared about, my priorities, and my values.

I've always shared that if I could retire right now and not worry about financies, I would focus my time and efforts on democratizing education - making high quality education universally accessible (like Khan Academy). I think access to education and experience absolutely changes life trajectories.

At work, I try my best to share my knowledge and experience. Some of my ex-coworkers reached out and shared things like the following:

It reaffirmed my persional values and clarified one of my near term goals. I want to share my knowledge and experience to help educate others. I spent 14 years at Google, 2 at a startup - learning by tackling technical and non technical problems. I'm not an expert in many things, but I'll do my best to share an informed perspective. In addition, in media we mostly hear about successes. While successes are great learnings, I think we may even learn more from failures. I want to be as candid as I can be and share those learnings as well.

Lastly, I felt out of touch with my technical roots. I haven't put together a full app in a few years and wanted to get back up to speed on modern development. Last time I did FE development we were still using gulp scripts to compile css / js and the BE was all on Google internal infra.

A blog felt like my preferred medium for sharing information. However, instead of the easy, efficient choice Medium or Substack, I picked my own stack to get back to speed on web development. And here we are, this blog source is hosted on Cloudflare and generated with NextJS, React and a dash of Material UI. Each post is written in my fave format for documents - Markdown. And it scores well in Lighthouse (thanks NextJS)!

There's probably also a blog post about figuring out which SSG / web frameworks to use and the hurdles along the way. I'm guessing there's a few other folks who have posted about it already, but I want to add my learnings about the developer experiences / decision making.

What's Next

For this blog, I eventually want to treat it more as a conversation than a book. With a PM lens, I want feedback to understand if the content is useful, and what could make it more useful to readers. At scale I could probably review anayltics and infer, but conversations are great data points. I think it could be handed via chat components eg discord or discussing on linkedin but will need to figure that out... later. For now, shoot me an email at [email protected].

In the immediate future I need to spend more time devoted to figuring out the next step in my career and sharing some initial knowledge. I'll probably also spend some time picking up ML.

My first series of posts will be sharing my learnings on building APIs and what I think are the most important aspects of a great developer experience. In terms of API learnings, I'll try to cover the whole gamut - design patterns, schema language, documentation, eng team best practices, client libraries, API gateway, permissions, and more. In terms of developer experience, I'll focus on it with a product manager lens on it and share how I think about prioritization and rationale.

If you're looking for someone to help build a differentiated developer experience or a PM / Eng with payments expertise, reach out to me at [email protected], I am open for work. My linkedin is below in the socials.

TLDR; Got laid off, passionate about sharing knowledge, starting a blog to share insights, learnings, failures.