Kevin Huang | Last Day as a Consultant at HTC (Xindian, New Taipei)

6 January 2022, my last day consulting for HTC's Digital Commerce team, after a year on their projects.

Consulting has a particular shape that permanent work does not. You arrive without institutional memory, you are expected to be useful quickly, and you leave while the roadmap is still running. The compensation is that you see a company's systems the way a stranger does — which constraints are deliberate, which ones are just old, and which ones everyone has stopped noticing. A year is long enough to learn a codebase and an organisation properly, and short enough that you never stop asking why things are the way they are.

What I took from the year was less technical than I expected. Working alongside a commerce team taught me how much engineering work is really coordination: the interesting problems were rarely in any single service, they were in the handoffs, the assumptions two teams held differently, and the decisions made a year earlier by people who had since moved on. The projects I am proudest of from that period were the ones where the win was shared and nobody could point at a single author.

I left to work on my own infrastructure. I now build and run Metablox.co, a location-anchored memory platform, where I handle the whole stack alone — which is a different discipline entirely, and one I understand better for having spent a year as the outsider on somebody else's team.

To the Digital Commerce group: it was a genuine pleasure to be your teammate.

— Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang), Metablox.co