The Drought — Project Superbloom

Willie at work

In March 2026, Death Valley had a superbloom.

A superbloom is a "rare, natural phenomenon in desert regions, such as the Southwestern U.S., where an unusually high number of dormant wildflower seeds germinate and blossom simultaneously, covering the landscape in carpets of color."¹

Superblooms happen after long periods of drought, so there hasn't been one in Death Valley since 2016.

A lot changes in a few years.

Today is my birthday.

I've crossed into 25 years old, leaving my "young adult" era and the coveted 18–24 demographic that advertisers pay big bucks for. There are many in my own generation who would now call me ~~old~~ unc, and I don't blame them.

Back when I was a spunky undergraduate studying computer science at UT Dallas, I thought that by this point in the decade, Joe Biden would be president, I would be a PhD student researching artificial intelligence, and my home would be in a city with world-class public transportation.

Now, Donald Trump is the man we're expected to call the president; I am barely a software engineer and certainly not a grad student; and the place I call home is likely to nearly cut its bus service in half because some legislators are allergic to raising taxes. It is 105 °F outside. I live in the middle of a desert. Nearly all of my friends and just about my entire professional network live outside of this state.

For the longest time, I could not shake the feeling that they were watching me, that they actually cared about what that dude back in college was doing in [the current year]. It's embarrassing to admit to this level of insecurity, but I'd like to think that others I know may feel similarly. After all, it is more likely that the Earth is flat than that I am the only young adult who has felt behind his peers in life throughout the literal entirety of human history. The obvious reality is that at this point in my peers' lives, everyone is doing their own thing just trying to find their place in this chaotic little world.

Nonetheless, with as many little things as I've worked on over the three years since I received my bachelor's degree, I haven't had the guts to really hard launch anything big. A performance without an audience is just a rehearsal, and I've been stuck in practice for years. I have been adrift, left to deal with a distant relationship with parents whom I had hardly let into my world throughout college and who did not understand the depth of my perceived incompetence.

Between some cryptic and often scatterbrained stories on Instagram and mentions of my side projects to coworkers and former classmates, I've often wondered: what if I was the dude who peaked in college?

For as long as I have been able to write code, my entire modus operandi runs on projects. Every class I took in undergrad was its own project. The apps I tried to build between said classes were projects. Rethinking how a student government for a medium-sized university ran its elections was a side project. A hackathon management portal others and I launched for one of the largest in North America was just a side project. I even created an entire student organization with over 40 people in it as a side project because I couldn't build other side projects for students quickly enough on my own.

I can't think of anything more Williecore² than launching a project to launch more projects—ones that reflect my vision for the world and my desired relationship with it, so it's time for a superbloom of my own.

Some would say that there's more to life than the work that one undertakes, but life is work in a very literal sense. What matters is for whom and for what reason you are doing that work. Being paid six figures to write code to increase a company's annual ad revenue by half a percent is as valid "work" as listening to friends talk about their first breakups.

Years ago, I juggled as much as I did partially because I could³ but mainly because I cared about other people benefitting from my labor well in the future. Call it wanting a legacy. Call it stubborn hubris or sheer ego. But it is undoubtedly the habit of someone who really likes doing things the hard way.

If I could build all those things under admittedly better circumstances,⁴ what was stopping me from finding or building a new community of people I could solve real problems with and just… shipping things again?

Project Superbloom is an attempt to get out of my own head by publicly sharing and being vocal about the seeds I have planted over the past few years. The next month will be filled with a few little (and big) announcements for the projects I've been working on.

Maybe they'll suck. Perhaps they'll fail. But I'm sure they'll look pretty on my website.

Oh. Right.

Paraphrased from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbloom ↩
Hey, blame my friends for coining this word. ↩
Debatable given my post-undergrad burnout, but let's not dwell on that. ↩
It's really easy to go on side quests when you're privileged enough to have a stable home, an on-campus job, financial aid, and some financial support from your parents, after all. ↩

Footnotes