Why I'm Writing

I’m Shail. I’m an engineer at heart, even though I’ve spent the last few years mostly doing management things.

Right now, I’m a lead at Netic AI. Before that, I was a Senior Staff Engineer and Director of Engineering at Rippling, where I helped launch Global Payroll across ~10 countries and built a team of about 60 engineers. Earlier in my career, I was at Uber on the Routing team, working on the systems that get people and things from point A to point B.

I never planned on being a software engineer. I took an intro programming class in Java and thought, yeah, absolutely not. Fast forward a bit and I somehow ended up writing Java full-time at Uber (and actually loving it). Life is weird.

I’m writing because I want to get better at explaining what I’m thinking.

A big part of my job is taking fuzzy ideas and making them clear—for other engineers, for leaders, and sometimes for myself. I know I can be long-winded, especially in writing, and this is my way of getting better at being clear without over-explaining everything.

This blog is mostly practice.

I’ll write about things I’ve learned, things I’ve messed up, and things I’m still figuring out. Some posts will be technical, some won’t. Hopefully a few of them are useful. If nothing else, they’ll be honest.