Leaving Buenos Aires

I left Buenos Aires with two suitcases and a codebase. The suitcases were the easy part.

Rebuilding a career in a new country is a strange kind of humbling. The work you did doesn't disappear, but the shorthand for it does — the references who can vouch, the reputation that walked into rooms ahead of you, the sense of where you stand. You arrive fluent in your craft and illiterate in the local grammar of how it's valued.

So I did the only thing that has ever worked for me: I built. Not to have something to show, exactly, but because building is how I think, and thinking is how I get my footing back. Every project on this site is partly that — a way of saying here is what I can do, in a language that doesn't need translation.

Berlin has been generous. Cold, direct, occasionally baffling, but generous. And there's a particular freedom in starting over on purpose: you get to decide, again, what kind of engineer you want to be. I'm still deciding. But I'm deciding out loud, which feels like the honest way to do it.