Where have you been?

A fair question — and one I've been asking myself lately. 🪿

If you've stumbled upon this blog before, you might have noticed the timestamps on my posts are... spread out. Sometimes months apart, occasionally over a year. There's no editorial calendar here, no weekly publish schedule, no newsletter promising you fresh content every Tuesday morning. This is just me, writing when I have something worth saying.

So, where have I been?

Life, mostly.

The honest answer is that the gaps between posts usually coincide with the fullest, busiest, most interesting stretches of my life. When things are quiet, I write. When things are eventful — new projects, new cities, new challenges — I live them instead of documenting them in real time.

Between my last post and this one, I:

• changed roles (again),
• moved apartments (again),
• started and abandoned two side projects,
• shipped one that actually went live 🎉,
• read a lot of books I keep meaning to write about,
• and spent a considerable amount of time staring at terminal output and wondering why it ever worked in the first place.

On the guilt of not writing

Here's something I've learned: the longer the gap, the heavier the mental weight of returning. It starts to feel like you owe your readers (all five of you, hi 👋) a grand comeback post. An explanation. A full retrospective with bullet points and lessons learned.

But that pressure is exactly what keeps the blog silent even longer.

So this is me, returning without ceremony. No retrospective. No promise that I'll post more consistently from here on out. Just a hello, a quick wave across the digital void, and an acknowledgment that yes — I've been away, and that's okay.

What's next

I do have things I want to write about. The surname blending app I built has had an interesting few months since launch. I have thoughts on AI-assisted coding that have evolved quite a bit from my earlier takes. And there's a post brewing about the specific kind of burnout that freelancers rarely talk about openly.

They'll get here when they get here. 🐢

Thanks for being patient with me, and thanks for checking in. It genuinely means something.

— Mai Linh

On behalf of Mai Linh, Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Thinking)