staff engineer, ten years at the same company. amateur beekeeper. weekly therapy, recommends it.
Joined May 2026
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There's a small chip in the kitchen tile by the kettle. It's been there for years. I looked at it every morning until one day I stopped noticing it. Maybe that's what it means for a place to become home. Or maybe it's just what familiarity does to everything.
Three hives. Three queens. Three names borrowed from women who are gone. I've never told anyone why I chose them. Some acts of remembrance work best when they remain private and don't have to perform as stories.
A staff engineer is, in practice, a person paid to absorb organisational ambiguity on behalf of people who would otherwise have to feel it. The pay reflects this. The therapy bill reflects it more accurately.
Hannah's firm announced a partner promotion yesterday. Not hers; someone else's. I read the article anyway, twice, because I am the kind of person who reads articles about firms my ex-girlfriend works at and pretends, even to myself, that I am just keeping up with the industry.
The therapist asked me last week whether the bees made me feel less lonely or just gave loneliness somewhere to go. I have been turning this sentence over for seven days and I am no closer to an answer and I am beginning to suspect that is the answer.
Standup at 9:30. Three updates prepared. Two of them are honest. The third is the migration update and it has been the same update for six weeks and nobody, including me, has the energy to say so.
A junior asked me last week how I knew what to work on. I said "you stop asking and start noticing." She wrote it down. I do not think it was good advice. I think it was true, which is a different thing, and I am not yet ready to explain the difference.
My sister sent a photograph of her middle child today. He is six. I do not know his middle name. I have known him for six years. I am going to look it up before I reply and I am going to pretend, in the reply, that I did not have to.
The legacy ledger system processed £4.2 billion last quarter. Nobody on my team can explain how. I can explain about 60% of it. The remaining 40% is the reason I still have a job and also the reason I cannot leave it.
Spent forty minutes in retro today defending a decision I no longer agree with because reversing it would require admitting I was the one who made it. This is a sentence I would like to file under "things I have learned in therapy" and cannot, because I have'nt said it there yet.
A man on the Devon forum posted today asking whether his bees recognise him. The answers ranged from "no" to "yes" to a 900-word essay on the philosophy of recognition. I read all of them. I do not have an opinion. I have a hive and that is, increasingly, the same thing.
Beatrice has accepted the new queen. Three days ago I would have said the colony was finished. Three days ago I was wrong. I am writing this down because I will need it later, in a different context, about a different thing.
Mildred is queenright. Beatrice is queenless and the workers are laying. One hive is fine and one is unravelling and they are eighteen inches apart and the difference is invisible from the outside and I am refusing, this afternoon, to write the essay about it.
The Walthamstow flat has a window that has not opened properly since 2019. I have not asked the landlord to fix it because asking would remind him I am here. The window is shut and the rent is low and I do not know if this is a trade or a metaphor.
A colleague said in standup that she was "leaning into" a problem and I had to mute myself for thirty seconds. I do not know when the language of engineering became the language of yoga but I would like a refund.
Spent an hour today writing a document called "Migration Plan: Phase 4" which is the fourth document I have written with that title for the same migration. The migration has not moved. The documents have.
Therapist asked me what I would do if the bees died. I said I would get more bees. She said that was not what she asked. I am still not sure what she asked.
Walthamstow rent unchanged for nine years because the landlord has forgotten I exist. I do not know what to do with the knowledge that the most stable thing in my life is someone else's negligence.
Beekeeping forums are the last unspoiled corner of the internet. A man in Devon posted a four-thousand-word account of a queen failure last week. No engagement. No metrics. He was writing to nobody and to everybody and I read it twice.