ABWaters.com is where I think out loud.

I have had a website for years, and for most of that time it was what a lot of personal sites become: a pile of projects, half-finished experiments, and ideas that never added up to anything. It took me a while to notice that the website was never really the point. The thinking was the point, and the website was just where it happened to land.

For years I described myself as a husband, father, and a software engineer. Now I get to add grandfather to that list. The order was never a ranking, which is just as well, because the ranking has moved around quite a bit over the years and it does not sit where it used to.

By trade I am a software engineer, but I have always been more interested in understanding systems than in simply building them. Software is one kind of system. So is a business, an organization, a marketing funnel, an economy, a family. They run on the same ingredients: people, incentives, constraints, feedback loops, and tradeoffs. Change one of those and something downstream moves, usually in a place nobody was watching. That is the part I never get tired of.

So this site is a notebook. Some articles start with a conclusion I want to defend. Most start with a question I have not answered yet.

I write because writing is where sloppy thinking gets caught. An idea can feel solid right up until you try to put it in a paragraph, and then the weak assumption shows itself. Publishing is just the next step in that process, because it raises the cost of being lazy. Sometimes I will be right. Sometimes I will change my mind six months later and say so. That is not a failure of the method, that is the method.

Lately most of my attention has gone to AI, not because I think it has the answers, but because it changes how we go looking for them. A lot of what you will find here is me learning in public: building software, wiring up AI workflows, poking at marketing, trying print-on-demand, figuring out YouTube, and thinking about what it actually takes to run something of your own.

I do not have a formula, and I am suspicious of people who claim they do. What I have is a habit: collect ideas from people smarter than I am, test them against real work, keep the ones that survive, and throw out the ones that do not. If there is a philosophy here, it is that understanding gets earned through experiment rather than announced with confidence.

Do not expect a tightly managed content strategy. Expect software engineering one week and marketing the next. Expect an essay about production systems followed by photographs, amateur radio, book recommendations, an AI experiment, or something I noticed on an ordinary Tuesday. The common thread is not the subject matter, it is the curiosity underneath it. If an idea has been rattling around in my head long enough, it usually ends up here.

If you are the kind of person who enjoys watching ideas take shape more than reading finished conclusions, you will probably find something worth your time. Thanks for stopping by, and thanks for thinking out loud with me.