About

Who’s writing this?

A sysadmin who started paying attention to money around the same time I started paying attention to kernel tuning. The instinct is the same — understand the system, figure out what’s actually happening under the hood, stop treating it like magic.

I hold a mostly passive portfolio. Total world index for the core, some factor tilts, a balanced fund for structure. I also hold Cloudflare and Google — companies I run, understand, and have chosen to bet on with a bounded slice of what I own. I know what that deviation costs me statistically. I’ve decided it’s worth it.

I’ve also made mistakes. Waited too long on some things. Optimized the wrong layer. Understood the theory before I understood what I was actually trying to do with it.

I’m not a financial advisor. This isn’t advice. It’s how I think about it, written down.

Who this is for

• Engineers who get RSUs and aren’t sure whether to hold, sell, or diversify — and want to understand the actual tradeoffs, not just the default answer
• People who’ve read enough to know they should probably have index funds but can’t articulate why, or aren’t sure what “enough” looks like
• The person running Proxmox at home with retirement savings parked in a 2019 target-date fund they haven’t looked at since
• Anyone who tried to “optimize” their finances and ended up more confused than before

What you’ll find here

The framework first — why the passive case is mostly right, what FIRE math actually assumes, how tax-advantaged accounts work and in what order to fill them.

Then the edges — when deviating makes sense, what conviction picks actually require of you, and the things I got wrong before I got them right.

No affiliate links. No sponsored content. No recommendations dressed up as reviews.