About Your Girl Ginny

I'm a software engineer/tech lead/manager, currently taking a hiatus after 20 years working in big tech. I spent most of my career (19.18 years) working at Google.

I ?retired? from Google in January 2026. It felt like the right time to go, and I know I can be doing more and better things with the time I have left. I'm fortunate to be in a position where I can, and that feels like a horrible thing to waste.

Lately, I've been pretty busy as a single parent of a pre-teen 🫥. I now get up earlier, and have a much longer commute (~3 hours round trip), than at any point in my job-career!

Beyond that, I am writing more, trying to capture some of my career experiences, the weird things that happen to me, and capture the eclectic thoughts that pop into my head. For some reason I've been writing a lot about domain names recently?

AI/LLM "Disclosure" (no AI is used intentionally)

The upshot of all the stuff below: I don't intentionally use AI/LLMs and avoid them as much as possible, but sometimes it's impossible to avoid or even know I'm using.

No AI/LLMs are used in my writing; for me writing is the fun part!

I am intentional (and picky) with the things I create, and would probably rewrite the entire thing even if I used generative technology (ask anyone I've collaborated with and they will tell you how annoying I am).

Sometimes I search for synonyms or spelling and maybe that's AI now because everything is? And the online Oxford English Dictionary requires an account and I'm stubborn.

AI/LLMs are avoided elsewhere (eg, CSS and HTML) when possible

This is partly rooted in not wanting the site to look like Every Claude Generated Website (ECGW) [derogatory]. It's partly rooted in having the site be fairly simple, static HTML. It's partly because I feel like I should probably know a little more about CSS because the last time I wrote HTML we just used tables for everything, which is a little gauche now (and hard to make accessible and responsive).

That said, it's very impossible to avoid these technologies entirely. It's fairly straightfoward to ignore generative AI (which I do), but similar to searching for words if I search a CSS question sometimes AI just answers the question (usually linking to the MDN web docs which is nice at least).

(Yeah most of my questions are how to center things in CSS.)

AI/LLM created content is avoided in external resources

External tools, templates, etc which use or were created with generative AI are avoided, though that relies on the honesty and transparency of those providing those tools.

It's impossible to really be sure I'm avoiding generated content when relying on the kindness of strangers, but many of the resources I used/use are getting better and more strict at least about AI content being properly labeled. I avoid using anything which used generative AI in its creation.

The primary external resource I used was the sadgrl website template generator which predates AI and doesn't use it. Because it didn't exist. Remember that?!!