Software engineering is an industry I had never thought I would end up falling in love with.
A little bit of background
During my teenage years I always wanted to be something different: an Actor, a Psychologist, a Teacher. Technology was always something I was good at (and my friends clearly knew that), but never something I would ever think about dedicating my life to.
Funny enough, due to that misunderstanding of my own preferences, after highschool I enrolled into a cooking school. I wanted to be a chef. I ended up working in restaurants until the realisation that I loved cooking, but not for hundreds of people every day.
I was 21 at that time and I somehow made the bold decision of leaving my job on the spot and enrolling back to college, this time into something I thought I was more passionate about: Art for videogames. It was there where I discovered programming. We only had one single class about development, everything was C# for Unity, and I will never forget my answer to the question our teacher asked us on our first day: “What do you know about programming?” My answer was a simple: “I enrolled for the arts, I’ve never tried programming but I guess I’ll give it a try.” Two classes deep into game development I already realised that was my thing, and that I was enjoying it more than anything I had ever studied before. My moment of realisation was when I was able to build my very first terminal pseudogame (nothing fancy, just a bunch of logs on the terminal). It felt like magic. To the point where I ended up dropping out and enrolling into computer science instead.
The downfall
Back then I loved every part of programming. I would spend my evenings and weekends working on small side projects for fun and studying new technologies every now and then (Ruby, JavaScript, Python, you name it). After graduating I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to get a graduate position in a big firm. It all started nicely, I was working a job I loved and getting paid for something I was really passionate about, even when the projects were not as interesting. On my free time I was still working on side projects, having fun and learning new stuff daily.
If you have ever worked on a software engineering team you know that enjoyment can shift very fast once you start moving up, especially if you do not change projects very often — which in my case was exactly what happened. Without knowing when, I found myself trapped in a position where my days were spent on calls with clients, meetings with other team members, and making more business decisions and reports than actually coding or designing anything. It got to the point where I spent more time in Teams or Excel than using my beloved NeoVim to build new features, and that was just the start.
With the current AI bubble, every major company is forcing their engineers, developers and professionals to use AI for everything, from small development tasks to complete implementations, just to speed up the process. Don’t get me wrong, I believe LLMs are a great tool if you know what you are doing, but I don’t find the same level of enjoyment talking to an LLM as I do while building and figuring things out on my own. The problem is I was forgetting all the enjoyment I had initially found in programming. My days were becoming repetitive and full of anxiety, and I was relying more and more on AI even for small things I knew how to build (who uses an LLM to change a button’s color or build a simple binary search?), it was becoming a problem, and I was getting more and more depressed about my life choices. Soon enough, my day to day job became a nightmare.
Realisation
This year I had the opportunity to help an old colleague build a startup. Initially I was there just to help him get set up on the technical side, but somehow I ended up building the first version of their platform. It was fun (finally some real development again) but also stressful. The more I built, the more I realised how much I hated the AI-dependent workflow I had mentally programmed myself into. I spent hours frustrated, arguing with an LLM about something I would have solved in a couple of minutes if I had just used my brain for a second. When you get too used to leaning on LLMs you stop thinking for yourself, and you forget how to do things on your own. You also don’t know where to look when the massive spaghetti code it generated finally breaks.
To give some context: the project had around 861 commits made by me over a couple of months, and if you had asked me where anything was, it would have taken me a while to find it (even as the so-called author). That whole experience caused me more anxiety than any development I had done before, and it completely rewired my brain to the point where I dreaded writing a single line of code. Worse, I wasn’t even able to think and write a proper line by myself anymore.
After all of that I started reflecting, and I remembered the times when I was learning a new framework or just building small things I wanted to build. I remembered a sensation of accomplishment I hadn’t felt in a long time. The real issue was never programming or my ability to do things. My problem was that I had forgotten how real programming felt, and how much I enjoyed learning new things and solving problems on my own.
The needed shift
So here I am. After all the realisations I had in a short amount of time, I decided to build this blog. The main goal is to fall in love with programming again and document my small projects along the way: no AI tools, just pure development and the headaches that come with figuring things out, and of course, trying new things like I used to and having fun while doing so.
Funny enough, and to be transparent about it, this blog was built using AI (not the content, but the site itself) and I am okay with that. I just decided it will be my last personal project built that way. From now on, I am back to the fun stuff.
If you are feeling stuck, empty or completely stressed about the current state of software engineering, I would recommend doing the same. Maybe it will help you regain your confidence and the appreciation you once had for this craft (it worked for me, at least). And remember, you are not alone. It is happening to a lot of engineers right now. You just need to remember what made you fall in love with programming in the first place, back when it still felt like magic.
I will let you guys know how the journey goes. Thanks for reading.