Starting

I've wanted a personal site for a while. Not a profile on someone else's platform where the algorithm gets a vote and the URL gets a redirect every couple of years — somewhere I own. This is that.

Quick context, since I'm not going to keep introducing myself: I'm Simon, a software engineer. I came to Boston for a job over a decade ago, originally from Florida, planned to stay a year or two and ended up putting down roots. I still get back to Florida regularly, but Boston is home now.

I'm a first-generation American. My entire family is from Colombia, a country I love dearly, and I am very close to my roots, speaking both English and Spanish fluently.

I'm married to the love of my life. She's a very private person, so she probably won't show up much around here — though who knows.

I work across iOS, the web, and backend — these days with a lot of AI in the loop. I think the AI moment is real in a way that most of the discourse around it isn't, and I'll be writing about what's actually working — the workflow, the prompting, the parts of Claude Code that have changed what an individual engineer can ship.

Outside of software development, life looks pretty normal — walks around Boston with my wife, Boston sports, a good beer, travel when I can. I also fly small planes around New England on weekends, and I'll write about that occasionally, including the unromantic parts.

No posting schedule. The bar I'm setting for myself is whether I'd want to read it if someone else wrote it, and I'd rather skip a week than ship a post I don't believe in.

Things I expect to come back to:

• Building software with AI in the loop
• iOS and the native developer experience
• Aviation, technical and otherwise
• Travel — the trips, the logistics, the places worth going back to
• Life in general — the opinions, the books, the things that don't fit anywhere else

That's the opening note.