Hello, World

Four months. No meetings, no on-call rotation, no Slack pings at 7 AM. This is the 4×4: a self-imposed sabbatical to build things I’ve been putting off for years. The name is straightforward — four months, two projects, each getting roughly half the time. It also describes the shape of the thing: long enough to ship something real, short enough to maintain urgency.

I’ve wanted to do this for a while. The standard advice is to take a vacation, decompress, then return refreshed. I’ve tried that. What actually works for me is the opposite: trading one kind of pressure for another. Deadlines and stand-ups give way to the quieter, more demanding pressure of a blank canvas and a clock.

What I’m building

Two things.

The first is this blog — a place to write slowly, without optimizing for distribution.⊕ This post is something of a counter-example: short, meta, not particularly substantive. But you have to start somewhere. Not a newsletter, not a thread, not a content strategy. A blog, in the old sense: text, dates, an RSS feed, and the implicit promise that the author will show up again.

The second is a wiki product. The working name is wiki but the concept is more specific: documents that embed live database views and evolve with AI assistance. Think Notion meets Observable, with a language model as a co-author that re-summarizes your prose when the underlying data changes. The idea is documents that grow alongside your data. You write prose, you embed a live query against a database, and an AI model keeps the narrative in sync as the numbers shift. I’ve wanted something like this for years and never found it built the way I’d build it.

Why now

I’ve spent most of my career in fast-moving environments. The upside is that you get good at shipping under constraint. The downside is that you rarely own the constraints. Four months where I control the entire decision surface — what to build, how to build it, what to cut — is a different kind of exercise.

The risk is obvious. Solo work with no external forcing function can easily become elaborate yak-shaving. Writing this blog on a custom Astro 6 build rather than just posting to a hosted platform is arguably already yak-shaving. The counter-argument is that I’ll be writing about the infrastructure itself, so it’s load-bearing yak-shaving. The counter-counter-argument is that this is exactly what yak-shavers tell themselves. I’m trying to stay honest about that. The test is whether I’m building things because they’re interesting or because I’m avoiding the harder problem.

Why in public

Two reasons.

First: writing forces clarity. You can’t pretend you understand something when you have to explain it to strangers. The act of publishing, even to an audience of zero, is a forcing function for coherent thought.

Second: accountability. Shipping in public creates a record. If four months from now I haven’t shipped anything, the evidence will be here.

More soon.