Nine Years Later, and I Am Writing Again

I am reaching out for an editor once again.

Last time it was Desk PM; a thorough partner through and through.

Today onwards it’s omm writer or bear notes app; depending on the mood swings and circumstances.

It’s been nine years, maybe closer to ten, since I last hit publish daily. Long enough that I’ve forgotten the number of days since I last wrote here. And felt it. The feeling of sitting down to write something that isn’t a PR description, a Slack message, or a spec - most of which is now AI generated. Maybe it’s because of the AI that I am now realizing my fingers still remember the shape of a sentence before my brain does. And maybe, just maybe, there’s a small relief in that. You know, muscle memory doesn’t ask for permission, right?

My fingers remember Poetry some days, haikus on others, a travel post when I’d come back from somewhere that rearranged something in me, a code tutorial when the itch to explain something clearly got too loud to ignore. Different pillars, categories, designers, needs and wants; same shell. And that was and still is the point.

Somewhere along the way I found myself drifting away from that point. Drifting away from rhymes, rhythms, expressions, stanzas, and bad grammar. Not because I ran out of things to say. Just because life got loud in the ordinary way it does. And the blog went quiet in the ordinary way things do when nobody’s forcing them to stay open. It happens, like it happens.

I am opening it again. Drifting in back, so to say.

Who this is, for anyone arriving fresh

If you’re new here:

Hi, I’m Manoj,

I’ve been writing code and building things for over twenty five years now. And prose for about as long, though the prose took more breaks and usually got the back seat most of the time.

By day I work at lemlist, on Taplio and TweetHunter. Neat social media automation products, with a small team of six developers at the time of writing this. These days I describe what I do as AI systems architecture, engineering, and technical partnership. A fancy way of saying I sit in the gap between “we asked an AI to write our entire codebase” and “we need to hire a CTO.” An AI Systems Architect and Engineer, if titles matter to you; a developer who never stopped being a writer, if they don’t.

Outside of work, I build small software for the Apple ecosystem, micro-SaaS experiments, newsletters, the odd things. Some of it has no business model at all, and I’ve made peace with that. And there’s a whole other side of me that doesn’t show up in the daily standups, photography, film, tea rituals, philosophy that leans Gestalt and Zen in equal measure, Tai Chi, boxing, long drives with no destination attached. The reasons extraordinaire, if I may, that lets me be fresh in those daily standups.

What’s coming back

The categories are the old ones: Experience, Verse, Travel, Photography, Poem, Haiku, and whatever code and architecture want to be called this time around. The poetry doesn’t need an announcement; it’ll just start appearing, unedited past a first pass, because a poem worked over twice too many stops being a poem and starts being a refactor that has gone out of scope one too many times.

The photography comes back too! Not curated, not captioned within an inch of its life, just what a camera caught on a day worth catching. And the haikus, because some days a thought only needs seventeen syllables and anything more would be padding and centering that div on the screen.

The bigger shift is on the work side, and it’s already sitting in the section above, so I won’t repeat it twice. What matters here is that the title didn’t change to sound better on a card or on this website. It changed because the old one, senior developer and freelancer, was accurate and also incomplete. It described what I built, not what I actually do, which is stand at the point where a system’s engineering & architecture and its AI layer stop being two problems and become one problem wearing two names.

Why, still

What hasn’t changed is why I’m doing any of this. I experience, I write, thus I exist. That was true nine years ago, over on the old indefiniteloop blog, eighteen days into a daily streak that eventually broke like they all eventually break; and it’s true tonight, first post in a decade, dust still settling off the keyboard.

Writing is how the days get to count for something beyond the day itself for me. Everything else, the categories, the title, the stack, this website, the poetry, et al., is just the shape that it all takes.

One post a day, starting today. Along with acknowledging some days the rain won’t let me. Surely because writing has gotten that much more precious, now of all times; heh. No really, just because the itch came back and I need to scratch it.

Let’s do this. Again.