Notes on Becoming
Harvey D. Pennings isn't my real name. It's a pen name, borrowed in spirit from One Piece, the way a good story lets you become someone before you become yourself. Everything you read here, though, is real. I write it myself, sometimes with the help of tools, always with the intention of telling the truth.
Who I am
I'm a human male, technically trained, spiritually inclined, and still figuring out how the two fit together. I hold an M.S. in Computer Science from a strong university in the United States. I think in systems, I get curious about almost everything, and I try to hold onto integrity even when it costs me something. Those three traits, curiosity, systems thinking, and integrity, are the closest thing I have to a personal constitution.
Right now, I'm working on becoming kinder, stronger, and more capable than I am today. Not as a slogan. As a daily, unglamorous practice.
What stalled
My career has hit a pause I'm not ready to explain in public yet, and that's fine. Some things need privacy before they need an audience. What I will say is that time doesn't wait for explanations. Everyone's clock is ticking in some sense, but mine feels louder lately, and pretending otherwise hasn't helped me.
Somewhere in the last while, I went from ambitious to adrift. Not lazy, not without goals, just unmoored from the direction I used to have. The world got louder and more stimulating than I could process. AI accelerated that feeling instead of calming it. I started worrying more about being replaced, being late, being behind. And underneath the worry, plain tiredness.
In that tiredness, I found myself returning to prayer, asking Bhagawan Vishnu (Lord Narayana), to help me find better footing in this life. Not to fix it for me, but to walk with me while I fix it myself.
Where I want to go
There's a specific shape to where I want to end up, too. Distributed systems, robotics, and Rust are the three areas that keep pulling at my attention. Systems that have to coordinate under failure, machines that have to sense and act in the real world, and a language that forces honesty about ownership and correctness before it even lets you run the program. That's the kind of work I want to be doing.
I'll say plainly that I don't have deep, direct experience in any of those three yet. What I do have is a couple of years of general software engineering behind me, and a systems thinker's instinct for how the pieces of a hard problem fit together. I'm treating that as a starting point, not a disqualification. Part of what this blog will document is exactly that gap, closing it out loud, in public, without pretending it isn't there.
Why this blog exists
I decided to build something instead of just carrying all of this quietly. This blog is that something.
It's a place to break the cycle of distraction and drift, to point myself back toward becoming genuinely good at my craft and building a career I actually want, not just one I fell into. It's part journal, part workshop, part offering. I write about the technical work I'm doing, the ideas I'm chasing, and the spiritual practice underneath all of it, because for me those aren't separate lanes. A system's engineer who ignores his own inner architecture is missing half the problem.
I won't pretend every post here is polished or certain. Some will be rough drafts of thinking. What I can promise is honesty. This is a record of one person trying to turn stimulation into direction, worry into work, and drift into something worth calling a life.
If any of this sounds familiar to you, welcome. You're not behind. You're just mid-story, like the rest of us.
— Harvey D. Pennings
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