Why I Started deadlocked.life

Every project has an origin story. Some begin with a burst of inspiration, others with a growing sense that something needs to change. deadlocked.life came from both.

For years, I found myself juggling ideas, side projects, personal experiments, late-night thoughts, and the occasional existential debugging session. None of it had a home. Notes lived in scattered files. Insights vanished into chat logs. Hard-earned lessons repeated themselves because I hadn’t written them down anywhere public enough to matter.

At some point, it stopped feeling productive and started feeling… stuck. Deadlocked, in the truest engineering sense.

So I created deadlocked.life as a way to break that cycle.

A place to externalize thinking

Writing forces clarity. It exposes fuzzy logic, patterns, contradictions, and half-formed ideas. Putting thoughts out into the world—rather than letting them bounce around my head like uncollected garbage—helps me move forward.

Also, I attended a lab at AWS re:Invent 2025 where we built a simple blog using Claude with Amazon Bedrock. That hands-on experience inspired me to create my own space for writing and sharing.

A space for exploration

I’m not interested in a perfectly polished feed. I want a sandbox: a place to test ideas about engineering, learning, productivity, personal growth, and whatever else I’m obsessing over that month. Some posts will be sharp. Some won’t be. That’s part of the deal.

Accountability in public

Sharing progress, struggles, and experiments in the open makes it harder to hide from my own goals. And maybe, along the way, something I write will resonate with someone facing a similar challenge.

Building something that reflects my life

The name deadlocked.life isn’t about being stuck forever. It’s about that familiar moment every engineer hits—a blockage that forces you to rethink the problem. And once you rethink it, you usually find a way through. This site is where I document that process.

How ADHD Shapes This Space

Part of what pushed me to create deadlocked.life was finally recognizing how much ADHD shapes the way I work, think, and move through the world. My mind doesn’t sit still. It ricochets between ideas, zooms in too close, zooms out too far, forgets what I was doing, rediscovers it with dramatic flair, then overcorrects. For a long time, I treated that as a flaw. Something to wrestle into silence.

I’m trying something different now: treating it as a signal instead of a malfunction.

For me, writing is a kind of practice. It gives scattered thoughts edges, boundaries, and a place to land. It slows things down enough that I can see the patterns instead of getting swallowed by them. It also creates a record I can return to when my brain inevitably sprints off somewhere else.

ADHD isn’t the theme of this site, but it’s part of the architecture. It influences how I approach projects, what I struggle with, and why I care so much about clarity, systems, and resilience. If anything I write helps someone else feel a little less tangled in their own wiring, that’s a bonus.

What to expect

I’ll be writing about: • Engineering thoughts and technical deep dives • Lessons learned from work and side projects • Ideas about focus, distraction, ADHD, and building habits • Reflections on life, creativity, and how I’m trying to do things a little better each day

This project is part journal, part workshop, part signal flare. If you find something useful here, great. If it sparks your own thinking, even better.

Here’s to untangling the knots, breaking the loops, and making forward progress—one post at a time.