About Me

👋 Hey, I'm Austin.

I currently work as a Senior Platform Engineer at the Ghost Foundation (which develops the software powering this site).

Over my 10+ years as a software engineer, I've ended up in a lot of spots where I've had to learn a ton of new skills in a short window of time in order to get the job done. While that may not be uncommon in the field of software engineering, I also tended to go down rabbit holes not only researching what I needed to solve my problem, but also why the problem/solution existed in the first place. Was all that information necessary at the time? Probably not, but I at least found it interesting 😅

I've been writing things off and on for the better part of 15 years, across several different mediums and platforms. These days, my writing tends to be more code rather than prose, but one constant has been the joy in sharing with others the random, sometimes esoteric knowledge I've picked up over the years.

That's what this publication will be about – sharing stories from my time as a software engineer, along with random deep dives into topics that I find interesting. Hopefully this knowledge is useful or interesting to some, or barring that, I hope you come away knowing a little bit more than you did before.

Why "Accidental Expertise"

There's a running Computer Science joke in various forms that goes something like this:

There are two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

In keeping with the joke, I'm bad at naming things. As evidence to that fact, my home internet SSID is just "wifi". Couldn't stand the initial random autogenerated name, and couldn't think of anything original, so I stuck with the literal.

The name of this website comes courtesy of ChatGPT - I asked it for some name ideas based on what I plan to write about, and this was the one in the list that I liked. I don't know that I'd categorize my expertise as truly "accidental," but as mentioned previously, I've often found myself in situations where I've picked up random knowledge, and "accidental expertise" rolls of the tongue quite a bit better than "random expertise gained through various unexpected situations" 😅.

On AI Use

While I did use ChatGPT to come up with the name for this publication, and I may use AI-based tooling in some form for initial research or light editing, all content on this site will be written by me directly.

AI use is a controversial issue on the internet right now. While I do have opinions on AI overall (that I may end up sharing in a post at some point), the fact is that AI-generated content (read: slop) is becoming more and more prevalent, and I have no desire to contribute to that growing body of low-effort junk. I'm writing this not out of a desire to make money through ads or clickbait – I truly enjoy sharing the random inane things I've learned and having AI write said info for me defeats the purpose.