Back to Zero

There's a saying: "Beware an old man in a profession where men die young."

I think about that sometimes. I'm not sure it's a compliment. But I understand the weight of it. The saying is gendered. The truth isn't.

In tech, 'dying young' means you stop building. Somewhere along the way, you lose that direct connection to the product. The bureaucracy takes over. The meetings multiply. Management follows, then management of management. It's a common path. For some, it's the right one.

I'm in my sixties now. I never made the trade stick.

Sure, I've managed. Sometimes I just managed — nothing else. But at my best, I managed while building, doing the heavy lifting shoulder to shoulder alongside everyone else. Even the best founders I've worked with lived inside the product but gave their people room to innovate. People punch above their weight when the person calling the shots has a dream worth following and their hands in the work.

So I kept drifting back to a blank file and the quiet satisfaction of breathing life into an idea.

This past year, I wrote more code than in any year I can remember. Not to prove something. Because I woke up, and that's what I wanted to do. Because a problem was sitting there unsolved, and I couldn't leave it alone.

I learned to program before Google existed. When I got stuck, there was no Stack Overflow — just books, journals, and the requirement that you understand them deeply enough to solve the problem yourself. And I shipped things that couldn't be quietly patched on Monday. If you didn't understand it, you failed in public. That shapes how you think. You learn why things work, not just that they work.

Maybe that's an advantage. I honestly don't know. What I know is that the problems keep rhyming. I've seen this architecture before, under different names, in different decades. The failures repeat. The traps repeat. I've fallen through enough of them to feel where the floor is soft.

When my last studio closed, the next step presented itself—obvious, respectable, and perfectly safe. I could've measured out my remaining years in alignment meetings and strategy sessions, preparing careful faces for careful rooms where nothing is yours. Tidy. Sensible. But how should I presume?

I went back to zero. I'm building again, mostly alone. It's probably foolish. A solo project can vanish no matter how good it is. But I've built things for other people my whole career. This one's for me. And for the first time, the shadow that falls between an idea and a shipped product has lifted.

I see the windmill on the horizon. I know exactly what it is.

I'm riding out anyway.

Because it's not about how many times the ground shifts or the studio closes. It's about how many times you can find yourself back at zero and still find a way forward to one.

Maybe that's what the saying really means. Not the surviving. Getting back up and moving forward. Again. And again.