If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that it wasn’t always just about C++. For years, alongside the language features and investigations, I wrote about careers, feedback, the seniority trap, and what it actually feels like to grow as an engineer over a long career. Then, about a year ago, I moved all of that out into a separate publication called The Dev Ladder.
I’ve now reversed that decision. The Dev Ladder contents are back, merged into this blog. This is the note I owe you — both to the readers who followed me to The Dev Ladder, and to the readers who’ve been here all along and might be wondering what’s about to change.
Why I split them in the first place
When I launched The Dev Ladder a year ago, my reasoning felt sound. I was writing two fairly different kinds of articles: deeply technical C++ posts on one side, and career-and-craft writing on the other. The audiences overlapped, but only partially. C++ readers came for C++. Career readers came for career stuff. Mixing them too heavily, I worried, meant that half of every post’s audience would feel like the other half was spam.
A dedicated home for the career writing seemed like the cleaner solution. Its own substack. Its own focus. Its own rhythm. Readers who only wanted one flavor could pick exactly that flavor.
For a while, that worked. The Dev Ladder found its readers, and the main blog stayed solely focused on C++.
Why I’m undoing it
Two reasons — one practical, one that took me longer to admit.
The practical one: maintaining two publications is more friction than it sounds on paper. Two places to point people to when they ask where I write. Two sets of small decisions about which post belongs where, and the occasional piece that genuinely belonged to both. The friction was small per-week, but it added up to a quiet tax on the writing itself. I was spending energy on managing the two sites that I’d rather spend on the actual posts.
The deeper reason is that the split was reinforcing a separation I don’t really believe in. The C++ writing and the career writing aren’t two topics — they’re two angles on the same topic. That topic is how to be a good software engineer over a long career, and you can’t do that well if you only think about the language and ignore the human, or only think about the human and ignore the craft.
A few weeks ago I published a post about what happens when a destructor throws. It started from a Dev Ladder piece about finding joy in mastery, jumped to a memory of an interview question, and ended in the C++ standard. That kind of crossing-over is exactly what I want to do more of, and the wall between the two sites was making it harder rather than easier.
What this actually means in practice
The merge happened recently, but you might not have noticed yet — because since then, I’ve only published C++ content. That changes now. Going forward, I’ll publish one career-and-craft post per month, alongside the regular C++ posts. Not a flood. Just one, on a roughly monthly cadence, mixed in among everything else.
If you mostly read this blog for C++, almost nothing changes. The C++ posts continue at the same rhythm. Once a month, you’ll see something that’s about engineering rather than the language — feedback, promotions, leadership, mastery, the kinds of things The Dev Ladder used to cover. Skip the ones that don’t grab you. That’s how I read most blogs, and I won’t take it personally.
If you followed me to The Dev Ladder and are wondering where the writing went: it’s still there. And the monthly career-and-craft content will be cross-posted on both sites - so you can read them wherever you prefer. If you’d also like the C++ content and the occasional book review in your inbox, subscribe to my main newsletter — and even if you’re not a C++ developer, some of those technical posts might still be interesting as windows into a particular kind of engineering thinking. If not, skip away.
If you’re new here, welcome. The mix is:
- C++ posts — most weeks. Language features, idioms, binary sizes, the long march through C++23 and now C++26.
- Career and craft — once a month. The writing that used to be The Dev Ladder.
- Books — occasionally, at least one per quarter.
Tag pages are the easiest way to filter if you want only one slice.
A small thank you
To everyone who subscribed to The Dev Ladder when it was its own thing: thank you. You took a bet on a side project, and the feedback I got there shaped how I write about careers now. None of that goes away in this merge — it just moves into a slightly bigger room.
And to the readers who’ve been here since the beginning: you’ll recognize what’s coming back. The blog is returning to something closer to what it used to be, just with a year of separate practice behind the career writing.
Next week, back to C++. The first of the monthly career posts will land soon after.
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