The engineer people talk about

I can build all of that, so where's the fame? I have the title, the teams and the pay. I still want people to know my name.

A pulp illustration: a packed arena, a spotlit speaker on a distant stage with code on the giant screen, and in the cheap seats one engineer with a laptop showing the same code holds up a sign reading I CAN BUILD THAT. Top: THE ENGINEER PEOPLE TALK ABOUT. Bottom: SO WHERE'S THE FAME.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to DHH on the Lex Fridman podcast. Rails, Basecamp, AI, agentic acceleration. Somewhere in the conversation, I stopped listening and started comparing.

I can build all of that. So where's the fame?

An embarrassing question. I could dress the question up as ambition or a desire to make something useful. But usefulness wasn't what I was wondering about while listening. I was wondering why people knew his name and didn't know mine.

I'm a director at a very large company

I run engineering teams at a company most people have never heard of. You use our technology every day, on every device, without noticing. If you ever notice us, something has gone badly wrong.

Nobody knows the company's name. Nobody knows mine either.

I have the title, the teams and the pay. The conventional version of making it looks a lot like my career. My career hasn't been a disappointment. That's not why the podcast got to me.

I can see the value in my career and still hear myself asking where the fame is.

A pulp illustration: a dusk street crowded with people absorbed in glowing phones, laptops, a cash machine, a car screen and a child's tablet, nobody looking up at the huge nameless grey office tower behind them, where one tiny engineer works at a desk in a single lit window. Top: YOU USE IT EVERY DAY. Bottom: NEVER HEARD OF US. OR ME.

Building was never the ticket

"I can build all of that" skips a lot of steps on the way to "where's the fame."

I used to say ideas were the hard part, not building. That's getting less true. AI makes building cheap, and that's making ideas cheaper too. Not because AI has good ideas. Because when I'm not spending all my energy on building a good system, I have room to think about what's worth building. The hard part has moved again. Now it's getting anyone to care.

Shapio came from being sick of deploying to add a field. I didn't go looking for that idea. It came out of the work. I built it, open sourced it, and launched it weeks ago.

Headless CMS is big business, so it isn't that nobody wants one. Shapio performs better than the alternatives. It looks better. It has features they don't. I've marketed it on Reddit and a few other places.

Zero watchers. One star, and I gave it that star. Nobody is using it.

So building isn't the ticket, and a good idea isn't either. The ticket is people, and I don't know how to get them. I've spent twenty years getting good at the parts that come before that.

A pulp illustration: the shiniest stall on a busy market street, signed SHAPIO, a proud engineer holding out a gleaming product beside a small scoreboard reading 0 WATCHING and 1 STAR, while the crowd streams past to long queues at plain grey stalls down the street. Top: BUILDING WAS NEVER THE TICKET. Bottom: NEITHER WAS THE IDEA.

Look at the list

Getting people is exactly what the names I reach for figured out. Zuckerberg, DHH, Linus. Very different people building very different things. Each of them got people to show up, and then got people talking about them. That's what I mean by the engineer people talk about.

Money is part of the appeal.

Linus has been rich for a long time. So has DHH. But the money isn't the part I keep coming back to. The name is.

I want people to connect something I made with my name. I want to be known beyond the people I work with. Those aren't comfortable sentences to write. They're true.

Back in the day, I wrote a version of Uno. The game was one of the first to hit a million downloads. My name wasn't on the game. A million downloads could tell me people wanted to play. The downloads couldn't make people know who I was.

I spent twenty years on the management track. I chose a life at home over making a name, and I'd choose it again. My wife and our three girls are the best thing in my life. I wouldn't trade them for anyone's fame. However, I still catch myself measuring against people whose names travel further than mine.

A pulp illustration: three pedestals under spotlights, a man in a hoodie on money bags labelled ZUCK, a man shouting into a megaphone from a soapbox of blog posts labelled DHH, a bearded man typing with a penguin labelled LINUS, and a crowd of engineers below filling the air with speech bubbles. Top: LOOK AT THE LIST. Bottom: NOTHING IN COMMON BUT THE TALK.

I still want it

I'm supposed to end by saying I'm not going after fame. Someone handed me a definition of success, I finally questioned the definition, and now I'm fine.

A pulp illustration: at night an engineer in a loosened tie sprints out of a corporate tower's glass doors carrying a crate stencilled SHAPIO and a laptop open to a blog, dinosaur game cartridges spilling from his pockets, a lit office window above him labelled DIRECTOR, and a spotlit empty stage waiting far down the street. Top: I'M NOT GOING AFTER IT. Bottom: THAT'S WHAT I'M SUPPOSED TO SAY.

I asked myself whether I'd take DHH's life. Not his name, his life. The answer is no, and it isn't close. I'm not giving up my family for anyone's fame. The want didn't go away when I answered though.

So I'm going after it the only way I will, without trading anything. At 43, around a full-time job, I open sourced Shapio, started this blog, and launched three games with three more coming. This time my name is on all of it.

By every other measure, I made it. I wouldn't trade any of it for the name. However, I still want to be the engineer people talk about.