There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from spending decades building compilers, wandering through web frameworks, desktop systems, multimedia tooling, and language runtimes, and eventually realizing that a lot of those apparently separate problems are really the same problem wearing different clothes.
That is essentially where I am in 2026.
For the last year, I have been working on a fully architected kiosk, front-end, back-end, administrative, and logistical orchestration system for 603 Oil & Propane. The system spans web and kiosk applications, networking, back-office software, custom domain compilers, SQL compilation, PHP and Laravel, intermediate-representation graphs, and a C# desktop administration application built with Avalonia.
I developed the system from bare-metal Ubuntu infrastructure all the way up through the application and UI technologies.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, I realized I was essentially back where I started.
Compilers.Only this time, the compiler isn't necessarily compiling a programming language into a single executable target.
It is compiling systems.