Midnight Train to Stockholm

The author is Mat Duggan, a technologist and writer known for autobiographical essays that blend tech culture, financial hardship, and personal reflection. This piece recounts a period in his late 20s when he worked at a struggling startup called Nodejitsu in Denver. Short on money and facing eviction, he landed a last-minute, high-paying consulting gig to fly to Stockholm and help debug a Kafka (a distributed data-streaming platform) cluster for a financial services firm. The essay is a meditation on imposter syndrome, the chaos of early-stage startups, and the strange, precarious moments that define a career in tech — not a technical guide. The Midnight Train reference is from the Journey song, fitting the mood of a desperate, transformative trip.