14 years as an engineer, written for people starting with a gap in their record

Author here. Chapter 2 is linked at the end of the post. Both chapters started as my own writing in 2024–25 and were revised this week with Claude Code; there's a post on the blog describing exactly what it changed and what I put back. Happy to answer questions about any of the jobs, the Bitbucket -> GitHub migration tooling, or moving back to India after seven years abroad.