Retrospective 2019–2021

The last two years have not exactly been the best years of my life, on a personal level. Still, I survived. The good thing about hitting rock bottom is that things can only improve after that. I might write more about the personal journey somewhere in the future. Let me just say that the most important thing to do when in trouble is talk to people — which I postponed for too long.

But I digress. On a job level, 2 years ago, I compiled a list of things that I needed for my next gig, and sent that off to any recruiter before starting an actual conversation with them.

This was the list. If you’re looking for detail, follow the link above:

1. Remote
2. Small empowered team
3. Sensible compensation
4. Node.js
5. Lightweight deployment
6. Front-end, back-end and all -ends in between
7. Historically creative
8. Vue/Svelte

Now, I did get quite a few recruiters offering me something to work on. But in all honesty, it never met the bar, and I’m pretty sure they never bothered to really look at that list.

So I instead started hunting for a nice gig myself. I had done some work on food optimization, and started looking for companies that were doing something similar. Then I found Carb Manager. Sent them an email what I wanted to do and why it would be useful for them. Didn’t hear from them in a while, and then at some point got a call.

The Carb Manager team was truly wonderful. One of the nicest teams I ever worked with. So if there is a lesson to be learned from all of this, then I reckon it’s this:

Make your own plan; be very explicit about what you’re looking for, and then search yourself for companies that are most likely interested in exactly that.

Then, after a major life event, I just had to stop working for Carb Manager. My batteries were simply depleted, and I could no longer focus. I guess that was the second lesson:

Know when to stop

For a while, I spent time mostly wandering around. And then COVID-19 kicked in. This is when I started worrying a little. Having worked for companies abroad for more than 10 years, I got a bit nervous about the future.

And then a friend called. He needed somebody to work with him on an energy startup in Singapore. Truth be told, the first few months were a bit daunting. I had to give in in some areas. It still involved a remote job, but I felt a bit less empowered than before, and the whole situation seemed a bit over-constrained.

Still, looking back, it wasn’t all bad. I did gain some experience with technologies I intuitively didn’t care about, and now at least I can comment on them from experience. (I didn’t change my mind about them though.)

Any experience is useful experience; it might be horrible as well, but gaining confidence in what not to do is equally important — perhaps even more important — than gaining confidence in what to do. It’s sometimes a painful experience, however, if some choices are made for you and you had no say in it at all, at least somebody else is paying the price for the useful but bad experience.

Also, another important lesson from this previous project:

Never underestimate friendship

Admittedly, there were quite a few things that I would have done differently, and there were some fierce battles at the start of the project regarding the direction in which we would take it, but ultimately giving in bought us some options to explore some other technologies in other areas.

Never shy away from a discussion about technological options. Don’t just give in. Trade it for something else.

In this case, we went with Node and TypeScript, React and a headless content management system that I started liking a lot. To be honest, I didn’t exactly want to bet my life on TypeScript and React, however I felt that I needed to experience it myself and I was pretty confident that it could be done based on these tools. In the end, it was even more enjoyable than I figured at first. In fact, TypeScript has been wonderful, despite the complaints I had and (in some cases) still have.