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Constantin, wearing a white shirt, smiles at the camera during an outdoor event. Behind him is a courtyard with wooden planters containing green plants, a white tent, historic stone buildings, and other event attendees enjoying the sunny day.

However you got here, welcome! 🧭

Maybe you followed a post about ZFS from 2010. Maybe you watched a YouTube video last week. Maybe a friend sent you a link. However you arrived, I’m glad you’re here, and this page is the quickest way for me to tell you what this blog is about, and where to start.

The one thing that hasn’t changed

Dig far enough into the archive and you’ll find me writing about Solaris, ZFS, and how to build a quiet little home server in the basement. These days I write about AI, work, and how to navigate change without losing your head.

That looks like a big jump. To me, it isn’t.

The topics rotated, from Sun-era systems, to the cloud, to AI, but the question underneath stayed the same the whole time: how do curious people make sense of a fast-moving technology, build real competence with it, and keep their agency instead of chasing the hype? ZFS was a disruptive technology once. So was the cloud. AI is the current one. The blog is called Constant Thinking for a reason, and the constant was never the subject. It was the thinking.

What happened (the short version)

I started this blog in 2010, while I was at Sun Microsystems, and after many years blogging on Sun’s employee blogging platform blogs.sun.com (now defunct). I started by mostly writing deep technical pieces about Solaris and ZFS, then Oracle acquired Sun, and in 2012 I joined Amazon Web Services as a Solutions Architect, where I spent almost thirteen years helping companies build on the cloud.

During those AWS years, the blog went quiet. The constant thinking and the writing didn’t stop, it just moved: into customer meetings, onto conference stages, and into press interviews and a lot of documents. Then in June 2025, I started a fresh career as a freelancer to explore working for myself, and this blog woke up again as the place where I get to think out loud. (If you want the full bio, that lives on the About page.)

So if you remember this place going quiet for a while, you weren’t wrong.

What you’ll find here now

The tagline says it: tech, work, and what comes next. In practice, that’s three overlapping themes:

  • AI and the workplace: what it actually means to work with AI rather than just use it.
  • Personal and professional development: careers, learning, focus, and the occasional hard-won lesson about getting unstuck.
  • Navigating innovation and disruption: the patterns that tend to repeat every time a new technology rearranges the board.

A few things you can expect: I write for experienced professionals navigating AI-powered change, and I reach for real understanding before quick fixes. I publish when I have something worth your time, maybe once a week, maybe less, in longer posts, shorter notes, and the occasional link to something good. I won’t sell you “one weird trick,” and I won’t pretend a tool will fix a problem that really needs understanding. I try to write to you the way I’d write to a good friend: honestly, on equal footing, with my own experience on the table first.

And if something here turns out to be wrong, that’s fine too. I’m trying to find what’s true, not to be right.

If you only read three things

Start with these. They’re the most personal ones, and they’ll tell you quickly whether the rest is for you:

  1. A new beginning, navigating the future: the short post where I left AWS and named what I do now, helping people navigate an unpredictable future. The best place to understand the jump from then to today.
  2. How to thrive as an Expert Generalist in the age of AI: why broad, curious people are not obsolete in the AI era, and how the “narrow” things I once knew (yes, including ZFS) quietly turned into something useful. This one is the closest thing to a map of how I think.
  3. Welcome Claude, my Chief of Staff: what working with AI looks like for me day to day, including an unedited interview with the AI itself. If you’d rather have concrete than abstract, start here.

If you came in from one of my old Solaris or ZFS posts: thank you, and welcome back. Those posts are still here, and I’m keeping them. The first one above is the gentlest bridge from that era to this one.

Stay in touch

If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, the easiest way to follow along is by email or RSS. I’ll write to you when I learn or make something worth sharing. Maybe once a week, maybe less, and I read every reply.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you find something here worth your time.

Constantin