Why I'm Finally Starting to Write

I've had a Dev.to account for two years. Zero Posts. Not because I have nothing to say. More the opposite, I kept, waiting until I knew enough to say something worth reading. That bar kept moving. Im EJ, a software engineer at AWS. I write Rust, think about distributed systems, and spend too much time on Codeforces. I'm also doing my Master's at Georgia Tech part-time this upcoming September, because apparently I enjoy being busy. Here's what finally got me writing. The Codeforces effect: I've been grinding competitive programming for a while. What I noticed is that the problems I struggle with most aren't the ones I lack the algorithm for, they're the ones where my mental model is slightly off. Writing a clean explanation of a solution, even just for myself, is how I find the gaps. I want to do that publicly. Forcing clarity. System design is weirdly fascinating: I got into systems because I wanted to understand how things actually work at scale. Not framework tutorials, the real stuf