Initially I had here LLM-sprinkled text of my technical interests and work philosophy, but once I revisited after a few months my first thought was “wow, this sounds so bland, nobody wants to read this generic crap”. Let’s give it another go.
I have been doing this programming stuff since 2012 and I still find it really difficult to articulate properly what drives me to do it. So I have decided not to articulate it at all and just stick to my blog’s headline and drop some random thoughts which will hopefully resonate with you, dear reader.
I have been working in products for my whole professional life - by conscious choice. Being part of a product team is really cool - seeing impact on users which are real people is a bit magical. You write random code which is then used by some folks, possibly folks around the globe, how crazy is that? Also being in product allows me to really see which technical decisions truly survived the test of time, which didn’t; when product grows it is always interesting to see which parts begin to break due to performance reasons and how naive and simple approach works great for years until it doesn’t - building a product long-term is always a great learning experience.
Sometimes my users are the engineering team - and that offers even quicker and much richer feedback loop. Improving dev tooling, optimizing CI experience, even adding long overdue docs can have instant effect; and oh boy that gives me that dopamine rush; that’s why I like to dabble with (big word alert) platform engineering if I see a room for improvement around automation and processes refinement
Hostly speaking over the years, I became less excited about technology, but I think in a good way. I used to follow Hacker News and every new trend - but the majority of that is that - a trend; very little from that information noise truly matters in the end - I become a patient observer and I try not to invest too much time chasing every new tech as in the long term it’s just exhausting with very little return. Maybe that’s why I like Ruby so much as the ecosystem is so mature and some problems were just simply solved years ago.
I don’t have one niche, obsession - I do backend, frontend. As said above, I automate things. I do infra and I can be your DevOps-wannabe. Last year, I even started to be involved with design and UI/UX a bit more as I always thought about those as my weakest side. So I suppose you can frame me as a full-stack developer. The same applies to my personal life - I don’t have a personality which revolves around one thing which sometimes makes me sound a bit boring when I try to introduce myself - as I don’t have that one “passion”. I know personally folks who are into travel, cinema, cycling, motorcycles, cars, cooking, running, or other sports, even crocheting - and the list goes on. I do not. I do like to try new things, but I don’t go “all in” into anything in particular. Maybe someday I will, maybe I won’t.
I used to think that type of the product I build is really important to me - I truly believed that. But I came to the realization that in the long term, what really matters is the team which helps me grow, work autonomy, and trust. My first “serious” Rails job was in SEO product. I had no idea about SEO and the fact is I didn’t truly care. But our clients cared, we had interesting challenges to solve, really fun and smart people, and a vision where the product should go - and I had a blast there for five years. The truth is I’m probably not going to be excited about the thing you’re building right away, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be excited about building that product.
As you noticed, I blog since I started coding “professionally”; some of the blog posts are mediocre at best, and the majority is just bad - but this is fine; at least I see that there is some progress in both my technical skills, the way I think, and my writing (at least let’s assume all those things are true). I don’t have any audience in mind; I have never promoted this blog anywhere, but I find it funny that some folks still manage to discover it - maybe that’s one of the reasons why I still try to write from time to time.
Thank you for reading!