Most job descriptions ask for a PM or an engineer. I've never been able to split the two apart, and after ten years of trying, I've stopped pretending I should. The PM half decides what's worth building and why. The engineer half builds it well enough to actually learn something. Neither one works without the other — a roadmap I can't prototype is a guess, and code without a reason to exist is a hobby.

The pattern underneath all of it is: build the smallest real thing first, then argue from evidence instead of opinion. I've run that same loop at three separate jobs across eleven years, and I ran it again building this site's flagship project. It's not a philosophy I adopted for interviews — it's just how the work gets done.