✡️ Jon Shieber ✡️

Happy to say that I've joined @usehercules as Head of Content Engineering. I love what @BrendanFalk and @gurgrant and the rest of the sweet team here are creating. The future of business software is very clearly a marriage of strong foundations and complete customizability. When I decided to go into tech journalism I didn't have a degree, I didn't have a background in writing and I had no connections to the tech world at all. What I did have was the Internet -- the great democratizer that let my words sit on the same network as the great writers I admired. I knew I could write, but I also knew no one would hire me without evidence, so I just started my own site. I wrote over a dozen articles a day for two years until what I was producing was finally readable. Then I got a job doing it and was able to work with and learn from incredible coworkers, mentors and subjects. at @thenextweb and @TechCrunch where I was writing about and talking to some of the best product people on the planet. Even though I've founded several small businesses over the years I grew to admire the people who had stepped off the ledge to try to build something genuinely new that could affect hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. I wanted to build. But I knew I faced the same problem - I was 'the content guy' and I didn't know how to code. But I also knew I came to it at the right time to have the same advantage as I had 15 years ago. It turns out that the skill sets that make you good at journalism like clear articulation, semantic precision, a systems-oriented mind, and above all, a genuine curiosity, also work well for coding agents. So I spent the last few years retooling myself. I now have code in production, tools in use and am filling PRs as we speak and I couldn't be happier. I'm hooked on the vision of Hercules - of bringing that same enabling power to business owners who know their world better than any SaaS provider or consultant, if they could only make it real. Let's go!