Andrew Henderson

I've spent fifteen years as a software engineer.

A couple of years ago, a difficult stretch in my career gave me the chance to step outside the path I'd been following and ask what else I might want to build. I became interested in online business and entrepreneurship, launched my own projects, and worked with people who were trying to build something of their own.

I learned about positioning, writing, distribution, audiences, and the new economy that has formed around turning what you know into something other people will pay for.

But somewhere along the way, I became more interested in a different set of questions.

Why do we organize our lives around forty-hour workweeks? Why has career become such an important part of identity? Why do technologies that promise to save us time so often leave us feeling busier? How much of what we call human nature is actually a response to environments humans created relatively recently?

That curiosity became the thread running through my writing.

I write about work, technology, culture, history, and human behavior — not because they're separate subjects, but because they keep leading back to the same question:

How did this become normal?

The method is something like archaeology. Take something that seems inevitable about modern life, dig backward far enough to discover where it came from, and see whether it still looks inevitable once you understand its history.

I'm also still a software engineer. After seventeen years of building software, technology inevitably shapes the way I see these questions. I'm interested not only in what technology allows us to build, but in what the things we build eventually do to us.

My essays, videos, and podcast are where I follow those questions wherever they lead.

If you're a senior engineer thinking about how to make your own reasoning and expertise visible, that's separate work I take on →.