My First Post

Jonathan Westerfield — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:25:39 +0000

Big Howdy,

I’m starting a blog.

That sentence feels weirdly dramatic for what this is to me.

The plan is to write about engineering, personal projects, things I’m learning, things I thought I understood but absolutely did not understand, and the occasional reflection after I’ve spent way too long staring at a problem that was probably my fault the whole time.

I’ve wanted to write more for a while, but I kept running into the same problem: a lot of engineering writing feels a little too polished; almost a little fake (I use semi-colons, no it's not AI).

Not bad necessarily. Just polished in a way where the author always seems to have known the correct abstraction, the correct database, the correct deployment strategy, and the correct lesson before the story even started.

I am not that guy.

Most of my actual engineering experience has been much messier.

I'll start with some assumptions, plow ahead thinking I know what I'm doing and then hit a wall realizing that the foundation of my idea was flawed because of... my assumptions. You know what they say about assumptions right? From there I take a step back, untangle the mess and get it right on the 4th try. If it was easy, I probably wouldn't want to do it anyway.

This is all well and good, but the real reason I want to write is because I learn better when I explain things.

If I can write down what happened, what confused me, what I tried, what worked, and what I’d do differently next time, then maybe the lesson actually sticks. And if it helps someone else avoid one of my mistakes, even better. I can’t promise the mistakes will be impressive, but they will be honest.

The posts will probably be pretty short. I’m not trying to write a novel every time I discover a new edge case. That said, I reserve the right to accidentally write too much if I get interested in something. This has happens more than I'd like to admit...

The topics will likely be a mix of:

personal projects
debugging stories
engineering tradeoffs
tools I’m trying
things I learned the hard way
reflections on work, burnout, confidence, and getting better at this without pretending it’s all obvious

I’m not writing this because I think I’m some grand authority on software engineering. I’m very much still learning; sometimes even successfully. Sometimes through doing something dumb and then having to deal with the consequences (honestly the most impactful learning).

But I do think there’s value in writing from that place.

Not the “here are the ten rules for building perfect software” place.

More like the “here’s what I was trying to do, here’s where I got confused, here’s what finally clicked, and here’s the part I still don’t fully understand” place.

That feels more useful to me. At least it feels more real.

So that’s what this blog is going to be. Small posts about engineering and projects, written as honestly as I can manage, without trying to sound smarter than I am, because I'm not that smart :)

We’ll see how it goes.

DEV Community: Jonathan Westerfield

My First Post