What shadowing taught me about building software

On my first day shadowing, I left with a notebook full of half-sentences and a head full of things I didn’t understand yet. By the time I sat down to make sense of them that night, half the details had already blurred together.

That gap — between what you witness in a clinic and what you can actually hold onto afterward — is what eventually became ShadowMD. The idea was simple: give pre-med students a structured, private place to capture and reflect on what they see, while it’s still fresh.

Here I’d write about what the experience taught me — about medicine, but also about building for a real need instead of an imagined one.