I've never been an exceptionally strong engineer. My mother was a systems analyst, and my first career was making comics. I'm good at seeing systems and seeing people operating inside them. And seeing where they can be safer, faster, better. I fail coding interviews, partly due to test anxiety, partly due to inexperience, and thus my anxiety led to less experience and finally to roles like dev education, building out react.dev and reactnative.dev with teams of excellent engineers I sponged knowledge off of. My mind was always faster than my fingers (read: typos), ideas bigger than a work week alone. Now, at long last, I can do everything I know needs to be done, unencumbered by the inertia of interpreting cryptic git problems and debugging error logs or convincing people to give me resources. So, now I build mima.social. It's so good to chew on these problems, make a delightful interface, talk with real users again. It's amazing. But I have no idea how I would analyze myself or another engineer now. Benchmarks? Token consumption? Ability to solve a problem from first principles? General detective work? And I wonder, was my previous job before going all in on Mima the last job I'll have in the tech industry?