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Dear future avid readers, forgive me for my nostalgia. I’m not new to blogging. In fact, I wrote my first internet blog in 1998, a time when uploading a kilobyte of an image was a luxury. We relied heavily on words, the cheapest string of bits we could afford, in our attempt to describe the randomness of our world.

That world has changed. Now, everyone’s lives are playing out on screen at thousands of megabytes per second. Who has the time, or the interest, to read blogs? Yet here I am, clinging to old ways.

Two years ago, a dear friend encouraged me to write a tech blog. We met on a Zoom call to talk about how tech blogging brought profound changes to our lives. It saved him from a life of poverty. It stirred me into finding my space in the industry.

Isn’t it amazing how stories can bring us to the right people at the right place and time - how they bridge opportunities and unexpected friendships? I promised this dear friend that I would write again. In fact, I made that promise to many people, who I ended up disappointing.

Twenty-five years of software engineering, two decades of parenting, forty-two years of discovering womanhood - surely I have enough stories worth writing. Surely, a handful of people would find some of it helpful.

Let me be honest, once and for all. I’m notorious for not following through my writing projects. I could come up with a thousand excuses. I could blame social media and my refusal to contribute to the digital noise. I could blame AI for being a more knowledgeable and articulate writer than I could ever be. Heck, I could even blame climate change for messing with my writing mood. But the truth is: I have no reason not to write. The same as you don’t have any reason not to be selective about what you read.  

Here's another confession and a kind of apology: I need to write, badly. And I need you, dear reader, the most. I apologize for putting this on you. I guess I have my reasons.

In the beginning of November, I was on a plane back to Denmark from Manila & I started watching a TED talk by Ethan Hawk on creativity. He said that art and self-expression is healing - that we help someone deal with their pain every time we express our own humanness – that when we open up, we send a signal out there that none of us are alone in our vulnerability.

Art? Open up? Vulnerable? How often do we see these in this industry? How much of our humanness do we still share in this piloted reality?

As the show finished with Ethan hawk strumming his guitar, the pilot’s choppy voice announced that we needed to go back to Manila due to a technical problem. We were told to find the closest emergency exit and read the safety cards in the seat pocket in front of us. As we hovered over the mountains with only the mechanic hissing of the propellers filling the void, all I could think about was dying. I thought: Great Marilag! You will die hugging your knees, on economy class, next to a hipster wearing a pink tie-dyed shirt and a silver nose ring.

Eerily enough, I felt more ready than I feared. But unlike in the movies where your whole life flashes before you, I didn’t think about how mine had been like, nothing about the legacy I’d leave, nor the lack of it. Instead, I thought about what life would be like without me, the unbearable pain for Erik, my kids and the people who love me. But then, time would pass. After a while, life would be somewhat okay again.

You see, dear readers, many of us are not okay right now. Sometimes it feels like the plane is just about to crash, that our existence is riddled with faulty machines. My job title for many years has been a solutions architect. I solve problems with (or in) tech. But problems never stop. Sometimes, in my pursuit of a viable solution, I end up with even more problems than the original one. But eventually, with the help from others, I do find a solution. I just needed time to think. And that’s what I will try my best to write about here. How to use time for thinking, understanding and accepting, so we can say with conviction that it’s going to be okay.

At the moment, I’m struggling to understand and accept many difficult and quite diverse challenges. How to run a profitable company with happy customers and equally happy colleagues. How to architect solutions that don’t hunt us in our sleep. How to empower software engineering teams. How to help communities. How to be a mother to young adults. How to balance ambition and wellness. How to be a friend. How to love more. How to heal.

I learned that if you want more readers of your blog, you should focus on only one topic. I’d like to think that you, dear reader, aren’t looking for only one problem to understand. That you and I are more alike. We’re multi-dimensional beings who absorb ideas from all points of view. We need to search high and low, shallow and deep, to find what we’re looking for. I guess what I’m searching for, who I’m writing for, is someone to keep me company, as I spend my time finding answers to these questions that no one can solve alone.

This year has been extra tough. I almost lost my company. I need time to understand how to be a better leader. I lost my beloved puppy, Frankie, to epilepsy so I need time to understand how not to let grief take over the best of you. I lost a friend to cancer, who I had a zoom call with two years ago about finally starting a tech blog. Sadly, he can no longer read this nor like any of my posts like he used to. I need time to understand why we’re still doing this, why we must keep on writing about tech and life and problem solving.

Perhaps, you’re also struggling to understand the same things that I am. If that’s why you’re here, then welcome to The Ladiebugged, the space where we can think together.

Who knows, maybe we could also be friends one day.

For now, thanks for simply being here to read. I really need that these days.