After 17 years...

I've been in the tech industry since 2008 and finally decided to create a professional profile site as of late 2025. There are a variety of factors that went into my decision, but, as with many sites like this one, it's really primarily targeted to potential employers and recruiters looking me up. Or people who just want to read about my thoughts on the tech industry.

Why wait so long?

Well, truth be told, throughout the course of my career, most of my work was done on a proprietary or otherwise confidential basis. Most of the systems I worked on were all password protected, so showing off functionality beyond a brute-force-protected login page was pretty difficult without breaking agreements with clients. Early in my career, this frustrated me and made me worry that I wouldn't ever have anything to show.

Eventually, I noticed that the lack of a professional site really didn't seem to have any perceivable effect on my career, so I never really thought about it after that. However, now that I'm on a job search again and I have been sharing my email address out with many people, it did strike me that "villanea.com" was not resolving to anything, and using that email address could potentially work against me.

I went back to something I used to do, which was redirect the whole domain to my Google Drive-hosted Resume, but when I tested this on my phone, I noticed that it just auto-downloaded the resume, which feels a bit... sketchy. I know that my resume PDF is not a virus, but does everyone else know that? They have no reason to believe that, and I know that if I go to a website and something forces itself to download, I immediately panic, so I thought it was best to make this site.

Why does your work history look like it's AI-generated?

It is. I used Claude to review my General (focused on my leadership and growth paths) and Technical (focused on my technical accomplishments and innovations) resumes along with the results of a TalentSet assessment and asked it to generate single-page versions of my history in each place of work. I reviewed the results and felt they were valid enough to post, but I admittedly do have some bits that I want to update soon, so that'll be on my to-do list between applying for jobs.

Where else did you use AI?

This site was 'built' with AI, actually. And I use 'built' loosely, since it's really just a Docusaurus site; the Docusaurus team ultimately did all the heavy lifting, but I thought about this interesting use case and decided to put it to the test. I've built Docusaurus sites for personal projects before, but never had an AI get involved in the build process until now. I was actually planning to build this on my own, but when I went to GitHub to set up my repo, I noticed that it had a new option "Ask Copilot to build this website for you" or something along those lines.

Admittedly, I thought, "No way this thing can just stand up a Docusaurus site ready to be delivered via GitHub Pages all in one command..." and so I did what I often do when I think there's no way something would work: I tried to make it work. It blew me away. Not only did it build the site, Copilot actually bothered to check Light and Dark Mode, ensure that Docs and Blog were set up properly, and my favorite part: I purposely left out the "ready to be delivered via GitHub Pages" requirement out of my initial request. Copilot set the framework up for that just in case without me asking it to.

The crazy thing is, I've been using Claude Code quite a bit on personal projects and it's accomplished some amazing things, so it's honestly kind of silly for me to be impressed about Copilot being able to set up a Docusaurus site but... honestly, I enjoy living in a world where I'm always skeptical of technology and it has an opportunity to impress me.

You've mentioned Personal Projects. Why aren't those listed here?

That's another reason I've withheld from creating a site like this. My personal hobbies and projects are very dear to me and I have made a concentrated effort throughout my career to keep my personal and professional lives as separated as possible. Honestly, that might be one of the main reasons I want to start moving away from senior leadership roles; from what I've seen, at a certain point in those roles, and for various reasons, the line between personal and professional life begins to blur, and that has never seemed like an attractive situation to me.

So you're just never going to share these personal projects?

Well, not necessarily. I think that the further I've made it into my career the more confident I've become in establishing that boundary between myself and my employers/co-workers. Early in my career, I had some seniors make me feel bad for drawing a line between my personal and professional lives. I was told things like, "Hiding who you are from your co-workers is rude." or "Trust goes both ways, how can we trust you if you don't trust us?"

These things, rather than help me relate to them, actually made me feel even more and more opposed to them learning anything about me. Eventually, I hid behind false excuses like, "I just don't like social media." (not all that false, but you get what I mean) or "I'm a boring guy, I don't have much to share regarding hobbies." and simply kept my distance. These days, I admit, this isn't much of an issue. As I got older and more accustomed to working with people, I learned how to be social while upholding my own boundaries, but it was definitely a hard thing for me to learn as a younger engineer.

So, am I ready to share all my personal projects and personal GitHub account? No. Not yet. But at least now it's less about me not knowing how to draw that line and more about just making the content presentable. As mentioned, these are all personal projects, so I often try new organization patterns, development tools, architecture practices, etc. I like trying new things with each personal project (it helps me determine the value of introducing these practices on professional projects), but that often leads to things being a bit messy, so once I get these projects cleaned up, I'm sure I'll be including them on this site.

What's next?

Next is... thinking about updating this blog from time to time while I juggle job applications and see what comes my way. I've learned a lot in my career over the years and have learned where my passions lie without a doubt, so I'm going to be looking for opportunities like those: Opportunities that allow me to focus on pragmatic problem solving, long-term solutioning, and doing my best to avoid the kinds of politics that impede innovation.