During my morning ritual of catching up with the tech world, I came across this recently and it made me think about my own journey in the recent months. 14 years and several hundred projects later, I decided to take a break from coding last year and do something different. I want to try and document it a bit in hope that it helps someone figure out what they want to do with their life.
I fell in love with computers since I came across one. I didn’t have patience for much else but I could sit down in front of a computer for hours on end and not get bored. Coming across new challenges all the time got me hooked pretty quickly and I never looked back. I went on to build and run a rather successful software agency for 5 years and later on lead offshore teams and design fun/fairly complex applications. Now that I have given you a very brief history and bragged about myself a little, we can move on to the point where I wanted out.
I was once turned down by a prospective employer because the solution that I devised for a problem was too simple and “not elegant”. I was pretty baffled but deemed it pointless to argue. Generally, in recent years web development has gotten weirdly complex, where it would take a few hundred steps to actually start writing code and trivial things would just break because of stupid dependencies, too fragile for my taste, things like composer made life better though. It’s a world, where the developers also need to act as sysadmins from time to time to deal with botched deployments. Where, if you are stuck with a windows machine for development, you wont be doing anything useful for a few hours. Keeping up whatever was happening in dev world was close to impossible and meant spending even your free time trying out new libraries. I got to a point where I was actually dreaming about code and project architectures. On the other hand, I found myself constantly battling the “nephew” problem and trying to convince the customers to stop being pound fool and penny wise or how nine women can’t make a baby in a month. On the flip side keeping things profitable for the company was always stressful. This all was just consuming my life and yet I was not entirely sure if it was worth it. My life was passing me by while I was just burning through way too much emotional and mental energy on things other than solving the actual problem. It was time to stop.
I moved into a slightly laid back job dealing with data, working for a not-for-profit that I found pretty darn cool. No job is without its problems but I started to see some changes in myself. At the end of the day I wasn’t completely burnt out anymore and I actually found time to care about my health and join a gym. I was sleeping better and eating better, I was waking up in a better mood. I was spending more quality time with my family since I stopped bringing my work home. I am not saying that the transition was easy, it was like detoxing. After a while though, I started to feel human again which was a new and pleasant-ish experience.
Coffee and programming go hand in hand as some think. In my case, I was smoking too, a pack a day. The combo kept me wired throughout the day but I found it hard to stop. As a result I was sleeping 4–5 hours a night and it seemed like I was stuck in an infinite loop. After I stopped coding full time, I was able to switch to tea from coffee, primarily to warm me up rather than wake me up during cold mornings. About 3 months ago I stopped smoking too, completely, without patches or gum. Surprisingly, quitting after 20 years of smoking wasn’t as hard as I thought, so I just needed to be in the right frame of mind to stop. My body rebelled against the change in the first few weeks but that only re-enforced my need to quit. Since then I haven’t smoked, other than on one occasion to celebrate my 12 weeks clean and after 3 puffs, I was done. I remember thinking to myself “This tastes like shit, what have I been doing to myself for 20 years?”.
All these little things have added up and I just feel better about myself, life in general and people around me. I actually finished a book for the first time in a long long while. I enjoy meeting new people much more now, learning about other things in life besides computers, caring about artsy, non-measurable, non-binary things, travelling and learning to take better photos. I still love computers and get paid to be around them, I still code on fun projects and think about how technology can make our society better. I am close to figuring out the elusive work-life balance and I am happier because of it.
I am not sure what all of this means, maybe it just means that I sucked at managing my work-life balance before and now magically I have figured it out.
Maybe whatever I knew or thought I knew about myself was just wrong.
Maybe the idea of being in control while coding just seeped through in my real life and happiness lies in giving up control and uncertainty.
Maybe I just used the coding world as a refuge
Maybe I just didn’t want to see what else was happening around me
Maybe I am just entirely just full of shit.
Too many maybes!
All I really know, I am a better person now than I was a year ago and I am happy.
