I was recently on reddit, trying to figure out why monorepos just feel right, and I stumbled upon this article discussing the advantages to monorepos.

It’s been a wild ride that I’ve come on - from being a strict molecular programmer, to a hardware engineer, to a begrudging software engineer, to slowly but surely seeing an infrastructure engineer peek out at me…

Now that I’m in the middle of it all, I realize something fundamental about my journey: I’ve always been drawn to building tools that make life easier for others. The only difference now is who I’m building for.

When I started as a molecular programmer, I was building tools for scientists and researchers - people who needed computational and/or electromechanical solutions but weren’t necessarily coders themselves. I was the bridge between complex algorithms and practical scientific problems. Every tool I built was designed to make someone else’s work more efficient, more reliable, more accessible.

Now, as I find myself drawn deeper into infrastructure engineering, I see the same pattern emerging. I’m still building tools that make life easier - but now my users are other developers. Instead of creating applications that scientists can use, I’m creating the platforms, systems, and processes that enable other developers to build their own tools more effectively.

The monorepo discussion that sparked this reflection is a perfect example. It’s not about the code itself, but about the infrastructure that makes development teams more productive. It’s about building the tools that build the tools.

This progression feels natural because it’s the same mission, just with a different audience. I’m still the bridge, still the enabler - just operating at a different layer of the technology stack. And now that I’m here, I can see this infrastructure work for what it truly is: another tool-building exercise.