Welcome to twindad.dev. Yes, I’m starting a blog in the year of our lord 2026. Maybe a little silly, but in an effort to spend less time consuming “content” and more time developing my thoughts and introspecting, here we are.
Where to start? I suppose an introduction is in order.
My name is Nick. I live in Sacramento, CA with my wife and twin daughters, who are three years old this month! And I’ve been a software engineer for almost exactly 10 years - not working for startups or Big Tech, but rather in the relatively unknown “civic tech” sector. These are a small group of companies who make most or all of their money from federal contracts, broadly focused on “making government services better.”
I’m extremely grateful to have chosen this sector, as it allows me to do something I love (messing around with computers with a level of focus and stubbornness that most people don’t have, making peoples lives better, working with people who share my values) without forcing me to do things I don’t love (building useless tools that ultimately just make billionaires richer, having my work dictated by investors and/or clueless CTOs chasing the next fad). It certainly has its ups and downs. Given that breaking things is generally frowned upon in government (even if we can’t always avoid it), we don’t typically “move fast.” But we certainly do our best to bring modern software practices and user-centered design into government, and we’ve seen real impacts from it.
It has also given me a different perspective on the way that this career is changing for so many of us. I’m no hype-pusher. I’m an avid listener of Ed Zitron and Cal Newport. I’ve read and learned as much as I can about LLMs and their inner workings, so I understand their limitations, and I’m hesitant to even refer to them as “AI.” At the same time, I’ve used Claude Code, and it’s absolutely incredible what it’s capable of. It actually can effectively automate a not insignificant part of a software engineer’s job. And I’m still coming to terms with this, as I’m sure nearly every software engineer is right now.
It’s also such a remarkably strange time to be a parent. So much of what we took for granted growing up as millenials is disappearing, and it’s pretty unclear what our world will look like in 10 years. How do we come to terms with raising our children into something we can’t anticipate?
Anyways, I don’t suppose I have any answers yet, but I hope to at least clarify my own thoughts through writing, and hopefully someone else will find value in my rambling thoughts too. Until next time!
