I just got back from a month-long break in Cambodia, traveling with my family. I took advantage of the wide-open space with zero work expectations to give me some time to truly reflect on my career so far and what comes next. I’ve had a pretty successful career in tech spanning twenty years that, for the most part, paid off quite well. It’s afforded me a life that I never would have imagined when I was running around barefoot in a trailer park in Warrenton, Missouri, and for that, I’ll always be immensely thankful. But for the past few years, I knew something was off, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Grappling with Discontent
Looking back now, my discontent with my career seems to have started in 2019 or 2020. Around that time, I picked up several hobbies like constructing Gundam Wing models, weightlifting, and digging deep into meditation as a way to better understand myself. While I have zero regrets around these (they are all net positives really!), I came to understand something remarkably absent: coding for fun. I used to get pretty excited about code and would stay up late at night working on side projects or sometimes just hacking together a multi-player blackjack website for fun.
My passion for tech became disconnected… it truly became nothing more than something to fill my time 9-5. While I got some joy out of coaching others, especially those stuck in their career and trying to figure out the Senior to Staff gap or the Engineering Manager to Director gap, everything else I had zero passion for. Everything became a task, a chore, a high-pressure situation to diffuse, etc. Work that had to be done, and someone needs to do it. During this time, I bounced around between a few director roles and got to try out not just leading Platform and SRE teams like most of my career but also new teams like Growth and SEO. But in the end, I knew I wasn’t happy, and something needed to change.
In May 2024, I took a drastic detour and left a stable role to join a small fintech startup as a VP of Engineering to provide some leadership guidance. I knew the risks were high when there was literally no interview process and just a straight offer, but I really just needed a change of scenery. I was enthusiastic about the domain and tech stack, but in the end, it turned out to just not be a mutual fit, and we parted ways. This left me wondering “what next?”
I knew I didn’t want to interview for a new role… I had spent a lot of time interviewing for roles in 2023, and honestly, it just felt like a colossal waste of time. There were so many months burned doing practice interviews and design discussions to be told no time and time again with a generic rejection email. I just didn’t have the stamina in me to go through that process.
Going into our vacation, the prospect of simply retiring and doing nothing had some appeal. Why not? I had gotten so much further in life than I had expected when I worked the 4am to 4pm shift molding brake cables at 18. Why not just stop working and enjoy life? With our planned trip to Cambodia just two weeks out, I decided to decompress, leave my schedule open, and take advantage of the time to dig deep and figure the future out.
Reflections in Cambodia
For most of the trip, I put all these thoughts on my career in the background. I explored Phnom Penh, took in the ancient sites in Siem Reap, and spent time in the villages in Battambang and Pailin. The best vacations are when you can truly just give up the worrying mind and take in the present moment.
While we were on the beaches of Koh Sdach and Koh Rong, I took some time out to catch up on reading and do some serious internal work. When in my career did I get the most joy out of what I did? If every day could be “the perfect day”, how would I spend my time?
As I looked back over my career, there were some highlights that stood out as when I was happiest:
- Building new products every week with an agency as their first developer
- Speaking at conferences
- Solving “hard problems” when we got Zapier truly off the ground
- Interacting with end users on support and releasing new features based on our conversations
- Really geeking out about technical solutions
I really missed the rush that would come from sitting down and building something after a brief conversation. I really liked building different ideas out and seeing what sticks. Something I seemed to have forgotten was when I first joined Zapier, I did have a FullStory-like app I was trying to get off the ground and originally viewed the role as a warm-up in the startup world as I pivoted on building my own startups. Unfortunately, I lost track along the way and got caught up in solving problems in the moment, of which we had no shortage.
I was always enamored with the concept of an Indie Hacker, building and supporting projects solo without the support of a large organization or team. If I can do whatever I want, why not do that? Why not just pick a language I like and build with it and talk about it? So that’s the plan… I’m picking a language that interests me immensely and going to start building.
The Next Phase
In this next phase, I will be buckling down and building up my expertise in a language I always admired but seldom got to work in: Elixir. Writing OTP applications with it was pure joy when I did some “just for fun” coding back in 2017, and I’d like to do it full time. As I learn the language and its various frameworks again, I’ll be an open book and share as much as possible about what I am doing and find ways to contribute back to the community.
I’ll also be building… a lot. I want to get to the point where each week I wake up Monday morning, sit down and start writing an application start to finish, and ship it at the end of the week (if not sooner). The more I build, the more I’ll learn!
Finally, I plan to get out there a bit more. I will be at the BEAM and Elixir conferences next year, as well as a few others I am eyeing. I’m also going to figure out how to do streaming and stream my build sessions often. Heck, perhaps this week I’ll just stream going through these Phoenix LiveView tutorials and run with it.
I’m pumped for what the future holds, and I am excited to share it with you!