Earlier this year, I was asked to give a talk at a community event on a security topic I’d been thinking about for a while. Public speaking isn’t something I actively seek out. I have never been especially drawn to the spotlight. But the part before the talk, the quiet work of pulling a topic apart and trying to put it back together clearly, interested me a lot. The talk came and went. The preparation, and the kind of thinking it forced, stayed with me.
That was what stayed with me. Writing, or any act that forces you to sequence your thoughts on a page, produces a kind of clarity that conversation doesn’t. Talking is fast and forgiving. Half-formed ideas get smoothed over by tone and gesture. Writing, even just a page of notes, is merciless. The gaps in your reasoning show up. Sentences you thought were confident turn out to be vague. Over the years, working in security, I’ve noticed that the arguments I actually trust are the ones I’ve written down at least once.
So that’s what this is. A place to write things down. Security mostly: not just tools and controls, but the organisational questions around them. That’s where most of my working hours go, and where I have something to say. Beyond that, the occasional essay and whatever I’m reading when it seems worth mentioning. The primary audience, honestly, is me. If someone else finds it useful, that’s a nice side effect. But it’s not a newsletter, it’s a habit I’d like to keep even if nobody reads it.
There will be no schedule. No weekly rhythm, no “here’s what I’m working on this month”. I’ll write when I have something worth writing down, and sometimes that will be often, sometimes it won’t. I care less about a clean publishing rhythm than about not turning every unfinished thought into a permanent draft. I’d rather publish a rough post that says something than sit on a perfect one that never goes live. If a post sits in drafts for three months, that’s probably a sign it should be shorter, not more considered.
That is what I want this place to be for: not performance, not output, but a way of noticing what I actually think. That’s the experience I’d like to extend. The name, by the way, comes from the --verbose flag: the one you pass to a program when the default output doesn’t tell you enough. That felt about right for a place meant for thinking out loud.