My first blog post was published on 15 May 2002. I was living in Singapore, working in the civil service, and the post was one sentence long: “All right, this statement reps my first step into blogging, which means I’ve run out of time to nicely format my own HTML just for my thoughts.”
Over the next seven years, I wrote nearly three thousand posts across several blogs. The main one, dsng.net, was a record of daily life, music, film, food, wordplay, and whatever else crossed my mind. I maintained a separate blog for baseball writing (Singapore Sox Fan, chronicling my long-distance Red Sox fandom from 9,500 miles away), another for arts and film criticism (Delta Sierra Arts), and even a short-lived fiction blog with the characteristically overwrought title “the naked emperor bestrides the void deck.”
Then I more or less stopped. Life as a Singapore diplomat in Washington DC didn’t leave a lot of time for blogging. I posted sporadically through 2014, and then not at all. Writing moved to Twitter, then to Threads and Bluesky as platforms shifted under everyone’s feet.
A lot has changed since 2002. I left the Singapore civil service after twelve years. I moved into consulting, first at Deloitte and now at Accenture, where I work on AI strategy for public sector clients. I went from being single in a Singapore apartment to being married with three kids in Bethesda, Maryland. I started building software as side projects. The internet itself changed beyond recognition.
But the impulse to write hasn’t gone away. And the things I want to write about have only gotten more interesting: AI and how it’s reshaping work, the experience of building software with AI assistance, raising kids in a world that looks nothing like the one I grew up in, the pleasures of food and wordplay and music, and the long view from someone who’s lived on both sides of the Pacific.
So here we are again. The old posts are all here in the archive, organized by section and era. They’re a time capsule of a particular moment in blogging and in my life. Some of them hold up. Some of them are very much of their time. All of them are part of the record.
Welcome back. Or, if you’re new here, welcome.