Beginner Again

So it is

After some thought and consideration, I think I should be a beginner again. That's what my personal agent told me after I asked for some side project ideas to get some motivation.

Honestly, I think I agree with that.

Things are not great

Recently I have been feeling kind of down. I'm not enjoying work as much as I used to, and my day-to-day life got into a routine. A very boring routine. As I tried to understand what was happening, it really comes down to changes that happened in my life recently.

To give you some context, not long ago I was a developer. I have already mentioned here, but I work building AI bots with GenAI. Coding, not specifically with AI-related themes, was something that I really enjoyed doing, and being able to build things and improve solutions is really what moves me. The thing is, recently I have been promoted (YAY! :/) and now I am a tech lead.

The thing with tech leads, at least at my company, is that they do not code anymore. If you really want to, you can, but you are going to have to work overtime to be able to handle everything, so it is better to just delegate things and keep attending to all of those really important meetings (really really important btw!) that everyone brings you to.

With that change, I noticed how important the work was for me to validate myself. My work was my entire life: it was what I loved to do, it was how people praised me, and how I earned my living. Now I absolutely do not love what I do. People do not praise me for it anymore (at least not as much as before), and I still earn my living with it.

Now I am a guy who has a job, and does not really have a life. The promotion took from me what I loved the most to do. It felt like a punishment, really. And now I need to find a way to keep going and not burn out over that.

Post Mortem

After some time trying to understand what was going on in my head, I noticed that stopping to code was not really the problem. Of course I really enjoy coding and I would probably be much happier if I could still code, but one interesting thing occurred to me. Even when I was coding there were times when I felt really burned out, and I was not really enjoying what I was doing.

The thing is, every time I had a new challenge or a new project to accomplish, I was always full of energy. Once that thing was not new anymore, and I had no challenge to overcome anymore, everything felt grey.

That's when I noticed, what brings me down is not the coding by itself, but the challenge, the learning curve, the things I would be able to discover and try out because of a new "challenge".

I don't think I ever really felt the "real" weight of that before, because as I was always coding, there was always something that would bump my curiosity or my focus, so even with some downtime, overall I was okay. Now with the new job, I cannot feel that effect anymore. My day-to-day does not give me any new challenges or things to discover besides trying to understand why I'm on yet another meeting that is not even related to my project.

Let's begin again

Thinking about my past, specifically when I was starting to learn how to code, I can remember how happy I was. At the same time that I felt really lost, I felt extremely powerful with the things I could do and the possibilities that were just ahead of me. Thinking about that, and how I would love to feel that again, I think I should begin again.

Begin doing new things, unknown topics, languages, projects, new hobbies, new habits. Things that make me a newbie again, with a challenge so big that I feel lost again, but excited to discover how to overcome it. And with my search for these things, I think I'm going to be able to disassociate my life from my job only, and I'm going to really start living my life outside the company. My life is much more than my job, and it should not define who I am. As much as I would love to code at work again, it does not seem to be an option anymore, so I need to create new options to be able to feel great about myself, my life, and my skills.