There's a powerful idea here: I'm not saying "this is who I am", I'm saying "this is what I practice".
Values aren't certificates hanging on the wall. They're forces that pull you when you're tired, stressed, or in a bad mood, right when we lose our way, when it's hardest to be the version of ourselves we want to be.
So this doesn't just reflect who I am. It's who I want to become, what I'm building in myself:
When writing this post about my culture, I asked myself: how do I express it? The answer was: I want to go back to that moment when I discovered Buffer, my first professional love, where I found values that still inspire me today: default to transparency, improve consistently, be a no-ego doer, show gratitude and more.
I also deeply admire the Unsplash team. When I discovered them, I was struck by how a small, focused team could build an incredibly easy-to-use product at massive scale. What really inspired me was seeing that engineering excellence, thoughtful design, and a great product aren't opposites. They actually work together.
These values show that I don't just care about building software. I care about how I build it and who I become while doing it.
This isn't an "about me" section. It's my way of defining how I want to work, how I want to treat people, and how I want to grow while building software for the real world.
Inspired by Buffer team