Often, I scroll through GitHub commits from my early days to remind myself that I built it. Not managed or reviewed, it was built. Line by line, module by module, code by code. Those commits feel like artifacts now. The engineer in me is still here, somewhere, buried under layers of Notion docs, Zoom calls, and recruiting spreadsheets.

I’m currently the CTO of a startup that’s “kind of doing well”. That’s what people say when you’ve raised some decent Series B, landed a few enterprise clients, and haven’t yet had a PR disaster. From the outside, we are looking sharp. A slick landing page, a well-spoken CEO, and just enough AI talk to stay relevant. But behind the curtains, it’s a daily grind of imperfect messy migrations, “just one more thing before GA,” and that Slack message from support saying a key customer can’t log in. Again.

The worst part? I barely code anymore. I keep telling myself this is for the best, the team needs me to think bigger, plan, and manage people. But some days I look at a pull request and realise I dont fully understand the architecture anymore. I hired brilliant engineers, and they’re building things better than I ever could have.

That’s good, and it’s exactly what I wanted.

But it’s also disorienting.

You start a company because you want to create something. And then when it grows, you’re not just building, youre a translator, a mediator, and a strategist. Youre the one in the room who has to say ” no, we can’t do that in two weeks”. Youre the one who has to make the big major decisions.

I never set out to become a manager. But here I am, spending more time shaping org charts than writing functions. And some days, I wonder if this is still who I want to be.

But still, every once in a while, I sneak back into a bit of code. A few minor bug fixes here, a CLI tool there. Nothing fancy or exciting, just something small that reminds me why I fell in love with this in the first place.

And it’s enough, at least for now.