Back After a Year and Something 🐾

Why the silence?

Well, hello again. It’s been over a year since I last wrote anything here, and honestly… I have a lot of reasons for that, some good, some not so much.

The short version: life hit hard, work hit hard, and I just couldn’t find the energy to sit down and write. But I’ve been thinking about this post for a while now, and I think it’s time.

Let me try to make sense of this past year.

The personal side of things 🌊

I’ve been constantly moving for the past 4 to 5 years and it’s crazy the amount of places I have been through. Two years in one place, one in another, one in another, and also while shifting places I would end up in other places for shorter periods of time. It gets exhausting… Not having a permanent base makes it really hard to feel settled, even when the place you’re in is actually beautiful. Right now I’m surrounded by nature, near the beach, but also kind of in the middle of nowhere. And not having a driver’s license when you live in the middle of nowhere is, let’s say… character building 😅.

On top of that, I’ve been carrying this quiet pressure that I should have accomplished more by now. The economy in my country is rough at the moment, food prices are up, housing prices are insane, and when I think back to how things felt when I was younger versus how they feel now… it just makes me really sad. Things were supposed to be getting better and I feel the gap growing, not closing.

And then there’s the software side of that same pressure. I feel like I should know more, be better, have more side projects done. But when you’re working 9 to 6, coming home to house chores, taking care of your dog, trying to study, it’s just a lot. It leaves very little room for actually living… It’s genuinely overwhelming, and I don’t think I gave myself enough credit for just surviving all of that while still showing up.

Otávio 🐕

The hardest part of this year, without question, was losing my dog Otávio.

He had a liver problem that the vets never fully managed to diagnose. He was hospitalized three times, roughly one to two weeks each time. He always improved and we thought he was going to make it. Even with liver problems, we wanted to give him freedom and a good life, not just keep him alive for the sake of it.

In the end, he just gave up… That wasn’t the life he wanted, and I think he knew it. He waited for us before passing away. We visited him, and one to two hours later, he was gone. At least we had the chance to say goodbye, and we were already feeling it… we came out of the vet devastated.

It was hard… Really hard. He was everything to me and my girlfriend, and there’s no way to prepare for that kind of loss no matter how much time the vets give you.

We were already planning on getting another dog before he passed, a brother for Otávio. So we got Black. I just saw a post on Facebook and contacted a sanctuary that was asking for help adopting him. He’s not a replacement, not even close. They’re completely different, but he gives us company, happy moments (crazy moments as well xD), and sometimes that’s exactly what you need. He has some trauma, he was found in a trash bin and we don’t know what he has been through, but from his behaviour we know it wasn’t an easy ride for him. We’re happy to be the ones to give him a good life and companionship, and also happy to have him in our lives.

What a bad day actually looks like

Since I mentioned not feeling great emotionally, let me be real about what that actually means for me, because “not feeling well” is vague and I think it’s worth being a bit more specific. It can be a reality not only for software developers but for anyone in general.

A bad day for me looks like this: I wake up grumpy as hell, I feel exhausted before I’ve done anything, I try to work on something and I get stuck in a thinking loop. I’m circling a problem in my head, bumping into new problems inside the old one like a bad recursive function, and I just think… And never do! And when I finally try to do something, only garbage comes out. Then I feel overwhelmed and frustrated with myself, which makes everything worse. The worst part is that I know I need to take a break so I can come back with a fresh mindset, but then I feel guilty doing it. It’s like I sabotage myself. What the hell are you doing? Don’t you want to finish this? You know what to do, why do you feel this way? That’s the hard part about handling feelings, you can’t control them, you just feel them, and you can only decide how to act upon them.

But honestly? I just need a vacation. As fast as possible 😂

The work side of things 💻

Despite all of that I got a job, and this year at work was actually really good and very fulfilling. I have noticed that as a Junior Developer I still make some lack of attention mistakes. Sometimes the path to a solution is not clear and you need to discuss it with someone to make it clearer. Sometimes you might clash with a solution you have versus the solution someone else has, but all in all, healthy discussions grow from these differences and it gives room for learning. Learning is about making mistakes. No one makes mistakes if they are not trying to do something. But let me tell you about the part I’m most proud of.

My first real feature

I was assigned my first feature, integrating a scheduling service for a client. It sounds straightforward, but this was the first time I was building something that real people would actually use. I was excited and terrified at the same time… I have this thing where I put very high expectations on myself and I don’t give myself room to fail. Which is both a motivator and a problem, you can guess why xD.

The experience taught me a lot. I learned how to integrate with an external API, got a much deeper understanding of the company’s API architecture, and ran into all the classic challenges that come with that kind of work, like state synchronization. When changes happen outside your system, how do you keep everything in sync? Sometimes you can, sometimes you just can’t, or sometimes you can but the solution is not great.

The feature isn’t heavily used, which is a bit of a bummer. But honestly? I’m still proud of it! It gave me something I needed more than usage metrics, the confidence that I can produce quality software. That I can take a problem, work through it, and ship something that works. (Honestly, now that I look at it, it could be better, but hey, that’s part of improvement and we also look at our old code like it’s garbage ahahahaha.)

How I think about code now 🔧

This is probably the biggest shift of the year, and it’s harder to explain than shipping a feature.

Before this job, I wrote code that worked without looking at how scalable or how abstracted it is. Now I write code and ask myself a bunch of questions first: Can this scale? Is this reusable? How much of this can be automated? If someone else reads this in six months, will it make sense?

I started thinking in terms of production-ready software. Generic, testable, robust. Testing especially, writing tests makes you really reckon with whether your code actually works, not just whether it looks like it should work.

I have been learning how things are run in the corporate world, priorities, deadlines, how a team organizes itself. I feel like a cog in a wheel because it’s a team. This time I am not the only one developing the application, there are more people involved and decisions are not made by me alone. Realizing that some decisions are to be made by the project manager or team leader was also a learning step. Who decides what? Who do I direct this question to about the product? It is also important to know how to move within a team, meaning you need to know who to ask things and be proactive.

In reality I don’t like the corporate world very much, but I don’t deal with the client, I just produce software. If I can, I will keep producing software for as long as I desire, because I am going to be honest with you… Sometimes I think, what am I accomplishing sitting in a chair producing code from 9 to 6 when the world is out there? But this is me being frustrated with the current working model we have in society, making us survive instead of living, spending most of our time working instead of actually living.

But the thing that actually blew my mind this year? Configuring stuff from the database, live, without deployments. Things like menus, you can show or hide something in the frontend by flipping a value in the database, no deployment needed. No frontend change. No backend change. Just configuration. The idea that you can change the behavior of a live system in real time through data rather than code clicked something in my brain that I don’t think is going to unclick, and I will probably use it a lot.

It made me realize that I haven’t even come close to these types of problems to be able to come up with these kinds of solutions.

Where things stand now

So here we are. A year and something later.

I’m still figuring things out, the housing stuff, the economy stuff, the “am I where I should be” stuff. That pressure doesn’t go away overnight. But I shipped real software this year, I learned what it’s like to be part of a team, to have people depend on your code, to navigate the messy reality of corporate development. And I have Black, who is chaos and joy in equal measure.

I’m still studying for the driver’s license, haven’t even made it to the written exam yet… And yeah, trying to study after 8 hours of work is… a lot. It doesn’t leave much in the tank, but it’s on the list, and the list is moving, slowly.

I’m not going to promise I’ll post more often. I know myself too well for that ehehehehe. But I do want to write more, because this felt good. Getting it all out of my head and into something readable, even if it’s just for me, is worth something.

Here’s to this year. Whatever it brings.

— c0lap5o 🤙