I’ve thought about starting a blog for years. Always had excuses — too busy, nothing interesting to say, who would read it anyway?
But here’s the thing: I don’t need anyone to read it. This is for me. A place to think out loud, to process the chaos of managing teams and studying cryptography and trying to be a human being all at the same time.
So here we are. Hello, world.
More soon. Or not. We’ll see.
— M
]]>I signed up for NYU’s MS in Cybersecurity knowing it would be a lot. But “a lot” is an abstraction until you’re sitting in a Monday night class on applied cryptography, half your brain still processing the incident review from that afternoon, trying to internalize why lattice-based cryptography matters for post-quantum security.
And yet.
I love it. I genuinely love it.
I’ve spent years building interfaces — making complex systems approachable. But at some point, I realized I was treating the systems themselves as black boxes. I knew what they did, but not always why they were secure.
Cryptography felt like the missing piece. The math that makes trust possible across untrusted networks. The elegant proofs that underpin everything from your HTTPS connection to the keys on your phone.
There’s something deeply satisfying about it. Unlike managing a team — where success is often ambiguous and progress is measured in culture shifts over months — a proof either works or it doesn’t. The math doesn’t care about your feelings.
What I didn’t anticipate: how much it would inform my day job.
Not directly — I’m not implementing crypto protocols at work. But studying security has sharpened how I think about systems design. Every feature now comes with a mental model of its attack surface. Every data flow gets scrutinized for trust boundaries.
And there’s a metacognitive benefit too. Forcing myself to learn something genuinely new, something where I’m not the expert in the room, has made me a better manager. It’s easier to empathize with my reports’ learning curves when I’m actively on one myself.
Let’s be real: this is not sustainable forever. Something eventually gives. Sleep, usually. Sometimes exercise. Occasionally my social life.
I’ve had to get ruthless about priorities. If something isn’t essential for work, school, or health, it probably doesn’t happen. The poetry I used to write? On hold. The guitar I’m supposedly learning? Gathering dust.
But this is a season. The program has an end date. The teams won’t always be this size. I’m betting that the investment now pays off in capability and optionality later.
This semester: Applied Cryptography. We’re deep into:
Next up: I want to dig deeper into zero-knowledge proofs. The idea that you can prove you know something without revealing what you know — it feels like magic, but it’s just math. That’s the best kind of magic.
If you’re considering going back to school while working, especially in a demanding role: know that it’s possible, but also know that it’s a choice with costs. You’ll be tired. You’ll miss things. You’ll occasionally wonder what you were thinking.
But if the subject genuinely excites you — if you find yourself reading papers for fun, if the problems keep you up at night in a good way — it might be worth it.
The exhaustion is temporary. The knowledge compounds.
]]>The honest answer: you don’t. Not in the same way.
And that’s okay — but it requires grieving the old version of yourself before you can fully embrace the new one.
When I was an IC, I knew our codebase intimately. I could trace a request through every layer, debug obscure race conditions, and make architectural decisions with deep context.
Now? I know the system at a different resolution. I understand the components, the boundaries, the trade-offs. I can ask good questions and spot when something feels off. But I’m not the one who finds the bug at 2am. That’s someone else’s job now — and they’re better at it than I would be, because they’re in it every day.
This is the first adjustment: accepting that your technical depth will necessarily decrease. You’re trading depth for breadth, and that trade-off is the job.
“Staying technical” as a manager means something different:
1. Understanding enough to have informed opinions
You don’t need to implement the feature, but you need to understand the trade-offs well enough to push back on bad ideas and advocate for good ones. This means reading design docs carefully, asking questions until you actually understand, and occasionally diving into code to verify your mental model.
2. Maintaining credibility with your team
Engineers can tell when their manager doesn’t understand the work. You don’t need to be the best engineer on the team — that’s probably not why you were promoted — but you need to be technically literate enough that your input is valuable, not noise.
3. Making good hiring decisions
Evaluating technical candidates requires staying sharp enough to assess their skills meaningfully. This is one of the best reasons to keep your technical edge: the quality of your team depends on it.
4. Knowing when to go deep
Sometimes the right move is to roll up your sleeves and dig in. A critical bug. An architectural decision that needs more scrutiny. A new technology the team is evaluating. These moments of depth keep you grounded.
Practically speaking, here’s how I try to maintain technical fluency:
The real secret to staying technical as a manager is this: hire people better than you, and learn from them.
The best engineers I’ve managed have taught me more than any course. They’ve shown me new tools, new patterns, new ways of thinking about problems. My job is to create an environment where they can do great work — and part of how I do that is by staying curious enough to understand what that work actually involves.
I’ll never be the best engineer on my teams again. That’s not the point. The point is to stay close enough to the work that I can help them be their best — and far enough away that I don’t get in their way.
If you’re struggling with this transition, know that it’s normal. Most new managers go through a period of mourning for the work they used to do. The trick is not to cling too tightly.
Your job now is to multiply the impact of others. You can’t do that if you’re trying to also be the best individual contributor. Let go of the old identity. Build the new one.
The technical work you do now is different. It’s in the architecture reviews, the system design, the long-term planning. It’s less satisfying in the short term — no dopamine hit from fixing a bug — but more impactful in the long run.
That’s the trade. Most days, I think it’s worth it.
]]>This will make sense to anyone who runs. For everyone else: bear with me.
My job requires constant thinking. Decisions, trade-offs, navigating ambiguity. School requires different thinking — rigorous, mathematical, precise. Both demand focus, intention, cognitive load.
Running is the opposite. When I’m seven miles into a long run through Prospect Park, I’m not thinking about anything. I’m just moving. One foot in front of the other. Breath in, breath out. The rhythm of it becomes almost meditative.
And yet, somehow, this is when insights appear.
I’ll be halfway through a run, brain completely empty, and suddenly I’ll understand why that system design isn’t working. Or I’ll see a way through a difficult conversation I’ve been avoiding. Or I’ll realize what I actually want, beneath all the noise.
The thinking happens when I stop trying to think.
I have theories. Maybe it’s the increased blood flow. Maybe it’s the physical exhaustion lowering my ego’s defenses. Maybe it’s just that I finally stop checking my phone for an hour.
But I think it’s simpler than that: running creates space.
My normal day is a stream of inputs. Slack messages, code reviews, meetings, readings. Even “breaks” are filled — scrolling Twitter, checking email, listening to podcasts. There’s no gap where new thoughts can emerge.
Running is a gap. Especially if I leave the headphones at home.
There’s something specific about running in New York that I’ve come to love. The city doesn’t care that I’m running. It just keeps being the city — loud, busy, indifferent. And somehow that’s comforting.
I run past people living their lives: walking dogs, arguing on the phone, kissing on benches. I run past the same storefronts, the same intersections, the same trees. It becomes a moving meditation on familiarity and change.
And the city is full of other runners. We nod at each other. A small acknowledgment: I see you. We’re doing this together, separately. There’s a quiet community in it.
Honestly? I’m always “training for something.” Right now it’s a half marathon in the spring. Last year it was a 10K PR attempt. There’s always a race on the calendar.
But the races are almost secondary. They’re the excuse, not the reason.
The reason is that running is the one thing in my life that’s completely simple. No strategy, no stakeholders, no ambiguity. Just: run. Move your body through space. See how far you can go.
In a life full of complexity, I need something simple.
Here’s something I’ve been turning over lately, during runs:
We spend so much time trying to optimize our thinking. Productivity systems, note-taking apps, frameworks for decision-making. And those are useful — I use plenty of them.
But maybe we also need practices that let us stop thinking. Not to avoid our problems, but to create the conditions where our subconscious can do its work. Running is mine. For others, it’s swimming, or walking, or sitting quietly in a garden.
The insight isn’t in the analysis. It’s in the space after the analysis, when you stop gripping so tightly.
Anyway. I have a run to get to.
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