Welcome to the New mcnees.me

I’ve had some version of a personal site for years, but it was always just a landing page — a few links and a one-liner about what I do. It served its purpose, but it never felt like mine. It was a business card, not a home.

So I rebuilt it. From scratch.

Why now?

I’ve been doing more writing lately — notes to my team, internal docs, the occasional long Slack message that probably should have been a blog post. I kept finding myself wanting a place to put those thoughts where they could live longer than a thread.

At the same time, I’ve been spending a lot of time with AI tooling, and the experience has been weirdly familiar. More on that in a future post. But the short version is: working with AI feels a lot like managing engineers, and that realization made me want to write more.

The stack

If you’re curious about what’s under the hood:

• Astro for the framework — it’s built for content sites and ships zero JavaScript by default
• MDX for writing — Markdown with the option to drop in interactive components when I need them
• Tailwind CSS for styling — I’ve been using Tailwind since v1 and it’s still my favorite way to build UIs
• Cloudflare Pages for hosting — fast, free, and I don’t have to think about it

The old site was a Next.js app, which was overkill for a page with four links on it. Astro is a much better fit for what this actually is: a place to write.

What I’ll write about

Mostly things I think about at work and after hours:

• Engineering leadership — the parts they don’t teach you, the parts that surprise you, the parts that are genuinely hard
• Technical deep dives — I still write code, and I still have opinions about how to do it well
• AI and tooling — how it’s changing the way I work, and what I think it means for engineering teams
• Whatever else — sometimes you just need to put a thought somewhere

I’m not going to commit to a cadence. I’ll write when I have something worth saying.

Thanks for stopping by.