I bought rotich.com in the early 2000s. For most of the years since, it remained an address waiting for me to say something.
I always meant to write. I have spent much of my life enjoying books, turning over ideas, and leaving thoughts in half-filled notebooks. I would notice something worth exploring and promise myself I would return to it when I had more time or a more complete thought.
That return rarely happened.
The practical explanations are easy. I was building software, starting a company, growing teams, parenting, and living between places that each asked something different of me. There was always work that felt more urgent than sitting down to explain what the work was teaching me.
But busyness is not the whole truth.
I am naturally shy and more introverted than many people realize. Public work may have made me visible, but visibility has never felt especially natural to me. I am more comfortable listening, noticing what others miss, and returning later with a considered thought than making myself the center of a room.
My upbringing strengthened that instinct. I was taught not to boast, to let the work speak, and to remember that no accomplishment belongs entirely to one person. In the village where I grew up, I learned that what I became would be connected to family, teachers, neighbors, the opportunities I received, and sacrifices that made my path possible.
Those are lessons I still value. They have kept me grounded and suspicious of stories in which one person becomes the hero of everything around them. But somewhere along the way, I began confusing humility with silence. I treated sharing a story as if it were the same as boasting about it.
Alongside that was a quieter doubt: I had not earned the right to take up that kind of space. I thought a person should have something important and fully resolved to say before asking anyone to read it. I became more comfortable showing what I had built than explaining what it cost, where I had doubted myself, or how much help I received along the way.
For years, I told myself I did not have much to tell the world.
Looking back, that explanation feels strange. I grew up in a village in Kenya without technology, earned a track scholarship to Tulane, and encountered a computer for the first time in college. I built an open-source project that traveled around the world, was displaced by Hurricane Katrina, started a company in Central Louisiana, and am now growing a team in Eldoret while returning more fully to Kenya, my first home, with a different understanding of what home means after a life shaped by more than one place.
The life was not short of material. I was short of permission, mostly from myself.
What silence leaves out
Privacy can be a form of protection. Not every experience needs an audience, and not every difficult season becomes wiser because it is made public. I still believe that.
But silence also edits a life.
When people see only the outcomes, the road begins to look straighter than it was. They see the company but not the trailer I called home while part of it was being built. They see the software but not the nights in a university lab because I could not afford a computer. They see a return to Kenya but not the growing cost of being far from aging parents, or the family sacrifices that accompanied the work. They see confidence where there was often uncertainty followed by another attempt.
By keeping the difficult parts to myself, I had unintentionally made the journey look easier and more solitary than it was.
That matters because some people look up to me. Young people have asked how I entered technology, how osTicket began, why I returned to Kenya, and whether someone from a place like the one where I grew up can build work that reaches the world. Colleagues have heard the lessons behind a decision only after the difficult part was over. Family members know different portions of the story, but not always how they fit together.
I have sometimes let those people down by offering the polished answer when the unfinished truth would have been more useful.
It was not because I intended to hide a secret formula. There was no formula. I simply underestimated the value of showing the uncertainty, coincidence, discipline, failure, community, and grace inside the result.
Telling that fuller story does not require me to abandon humility. In fact, humility may require it. An honest account makes room for the people who helped, the doors that opened, the doors that closed, and the moments when I did not know what to do next. It replaces the myth of the solitary founder with something more human and more useful.
Why musings
I like the word musings because it leaves room for thought to remain alive.
I call them notes rather than blog posts deliberately. A blog post can sound like a finished argument presented for publication. A note feels closer to how I actually think: an observation recorded, a question followed, a lesson tested against experience, or an idea connected to something I wrote before. Some notes may grow into fuller essays. Others may remain small. All of them can be revisited as the thinking changes.
These notes are not declarations carved in stone. They are a place to pay attention in public. Some will come from building products and teams. Others will come from running, parenting, returning home, reading, open source, leadership, failure, and the unfinished work of becoming.
Some ideas will connect to stories I have already lived. Others may become questions I carry for years. I expect to revise myself. I reserve the right to learn something new and change my mind.
That is not a disclaimer. It is part of the point.
The internet often rewards certainty delivered quickly. Most of what has mattered in my life has taken longer. A useful product is shaped by years of people depending on it. A company becomes itself through decisions repeated when no one is watching. A return home means something different after you have stayed long enough to see the place and yourself change again.
Writing gives those changes somewhere to accumulate. It also gives me an outlet for thoughts I have carried quietly.
A notebook with the door open
I do not want this to become a performance of having answers. I want it to feel more like a notebook with the door open.
There will be stories from StraitOuttaVillage, an unfolding memoir about the long arc from a village in Kenya to America and back. More precisely, it is the road from Kolong village in Nandi County, Kenya, to New Orleans and Alexandria in Louisiana, then to Eldoret, Kenya, and eventually back to my roots.
There will be notes about the struggle of building osTicket, growing Enhancesoft, and the people carrying that work into another generation. There will be questions about opportunity, place, responsibility, and why a company should work hard. There will also be smaller observations that may not lead anywhere obvious until much later.
I have owned this address for more than two decades. It is time to make it a home for the ideas I kept postponing.
Maybe I did not need more to tell the world.
I needed to trust that the life I was already living was worth paying attention to.
Welcome to my corner in the interwebz. It is a pleasure connecting with you.