On Signaling
Why a personal domain, not just a resume.
Have you ever wondered how your ability actually gets perceived by other people? I know that's an epistemological question, and one that can never be fully answered.
But if we narrow that question to one specific case - “how does a recruiter evaluate you?” - how does the framework of Costly Signaling Theory help us answer it?
First, consider what a recruiter is actually trying to do: hire someone who can solve real problems for the business, which really comes down to: “Does this candidate actually possess the competence they claim?”
The problem is they have no way to observe your true ability directly. All they can see are proxies - a resume, projects, GitHub, blog posts, an interview - and they use these observable signals to infer competence that remains unobservable.
Costly Signaling
What is Costly Signaling Theory? It rests on the premise that when a signal is emitted, you also incur a corresponding cost to produce it.
Consider this: when someone publishes a post titled “10 Tips to Save Tokens When Using AI,” how much effort went into making it? You could skim a few sources, stitch them together, or simply ask a model to generate it and hit publish. Now compare that to noticing something connected to real system behavior and writing up a detailed technical decision choice (of course, you could still use AI to rephrase the prose).
Between those two scenarios, which one incurs a higher cost to produce?
If you chose the second, you already understand the core intuition of Costly Signaling Theory: signals that are more expensive to produce are weighted more heavily by evaluators. This assumes the recruiter starts with zero prior information about you - a condition economists call “information asymmetry,” where others lack complete information about your ability (though they approximate it through proxies) while you know it best.
And this is precisely what this personal notebook site attempts to solve.
Why a Personal Domain and Custom Site?
How does a personal domain solve this information asymmetry?
First, it is where I can show real output - my reasoning, technical decisions, and problem-solving process, giving recruiters concrete material to estimate my engineering depth from instead of ungrounded claims.
Second, a personal domain creates a signal of ownership and commitment. Unlike a profile hosted on a third-party platform, this is a space I actively maintain, structure, and sustain over time - which requires ongoing financial cost, time, and deliberate effort.
And why custom code instead of an off-the-shelf blogging platform? A custom-built site is evidence of not depending on any third-party publishing platform to dictate the shape of my content or identity. Most importantly, it allows me to present a connected knowledge graph showing how concepts, benchmarks, and architectural decisions interlock, with full control over layout and visual hierarchy.
Writing as Becoming
My internal motivation for writing is to “become” through the process of writing itself. Writing is not about exhibiting things that are already finished; it is the space where my identity gets shaped with every article. By the tenth article, I understand my own thinking differently than I did on the first, and this domain is my commitment to an ongoing process rather than a static outcome.
I want others to see what I have built, how I reason, and how I evolve - bridging the information asymmetry between what I know of myself and what someone evaluating me in a short window needs to understand.