It has been almost six years since my last post here. Six years! When I wrote about joining Facebook back in 2020, I had no idea it would be this long before I’d write again. Life got busy, priorities shifted, and the blog quietly went to sleep.

Well, it’s waking up now.

What happened since 2020

A lot has changed. Facebook became Meta, and I moved from software engineering into engineering management. I currently run a team in Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), where we build the data infrastructure behind Meta’s generative AI efforts - web crawlers, synthetic data pipelines, and infrastructure for AI agents.

I have to be honest - I am absolutely loving it. Working at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems and AI is exactly the kind of challenge I was looking for. The pace is intense, the problems are fascinating, and the people I work with are some of the best I have ever worked with.

The transition from IC to manager was its own journey. I still remember being quite nervous about giving up the daily coding. What I discovered is that the leadership skills I wrote about on this blog years ago - motivating teams, listening to others, staying humble - turned out to be far more useful than I expected. Funny how that works.

Why I’m writing again

Two reasons, really.

First, I have been building a bunch of side projects recently and I want to share what I’m learning. I’m running The Dice Drop - a board games website and Twitter bot, Indie Game Drop - an indie game discovery platform, and BattleCast - a D&D combat simulator that is just getting started. Building these has taught me a lot about working with AI tools, deploying static sites, running automated content pipelines, and all sorts of things that I think are worth sharing.

Second, the AI wave has changed everything. When I started this blog in 2018, I was writing about Spring Boot and microservices. Those topics are still relevant, but the world has moved on. I now work with LLMs every day, both at Meta and in my side projects. I use Claude Code to build prototypes, I use AI assistants to manage my workflows, and I’m seeing first-hand how these tools are reshaping what a single developer (or a small team) can accomplish. I want to write about that.

What to expect

The blog is going to be a bit different this time around. You’ll still see technical content, but the focus is shifting:

  • AI and LLMs in practice - not the hype, but the real experience of building with these tools
  • Side project diaries - the messy reality of building products in your spare time
  • The occasional opinion piece - because some things haven’t changed

When I started e4developer, I wrote over 100 posts in the first year. That was quite a challenge! This time around, no such challenges - just writing for fun and sharing things I find genuinely interesting.

A fresh start

You might notice the blog looks a bit different. I migrated the whole thing from WordPress to Hugo, gave it a new design, and moved it to GitHub Pages. All the old articles are still here - every single one of them. The HATEOAS explanation, the Spring Boot best practices, the “please stop writing for loops” post that apparently resonated with a lot of people. They’re all part of the story.

If you’ve been reading e4developer before - thank you. Your support over the years meant more to me than you probably realize. And if you’re new here - welcome! I hope you find something useful.

Let’s see where this goes. Till next time!