I'm Jeff Hodsdon. Started in tech during the Digg days—web 2.0, when everything felt possible and a little chaotic—then somehow ended up behind a camera I built shooting for Dior, photographing Naomi Campbell, giving silent acting prompts to Jeff Goldblum. And yet at the foundation, I'm still in vim—writing UDP HTTP/3 QUIC in Rust because I desire connection ID migration across the networks our radio phones use. The through-line, I think, is product. I've always loved product. The making of it, the feel of it, the moment when something clicks into place.

A product is a thing people use—it's software second. I put the builder last the product first. I value the individual. I never say "one user affected"—that's a person. Can you use it with one hand? Between the front door and the car in the driveway? Running down the stairs of a subway station? Does it need a manual, or is it self-evident? Obsessing over <100ms startup times, embedding 3D color LUT cubes into the binary to remove an additional disk read, over the little frictions most people don't notice until they're gone.

At some point the products I was using stopped working for me. The "identify and fix problems"—endless loop of builder self-fulfilment. I don't assume something is broken for everyone else. It just stopped working for me. Therefore, I started replacing them. The apps on my phone now are ones I built myself, things I open every day, tools shaped exactly around how I carry myself through my day. Most people who are good at what they do, you don't notice—a subtraction of work, a void of needs. I try to value the inverse. I listen to understand, not to respond. I build for myself first—selfish, maybe—but I don't think I'm that unusual. Are others out there with the same quiet discontent, waiting for something that doesn't exist yet?

Or maybe this is all just an impression, like Monimus says.