Last year when I was working as a contractor for a US company, I mentioned to my team leader that I’m sick of tech and I really want to close my laptop for the last time ever, go outside and start making wood flutes or something.
Instead of telling me that it will be better, he says that sometimes he contemplates buying a bar and just serving people and listening to their stories.
On that day I realized that not tech, but the idiotic company processes and the people I had to put up with were what got me into that state. I was hired as a Python backend developer, but I was also working as a Postgis expert (and I was no expert, I had no idea what I was doing), Go+gRPC integrator, Kube and Docker Swarm ops guy, frontend debugging person and I was in charge of the dev experience internal tools. It was simply too much to keep up with.
That same month I resigned and started working on selling my own product. 3 long months later, I launched the paid version of Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) and I again discovered why I like being in tech.
There’s a kind of freedom that you can rarely find in other domains. You can be creative, start ideas on a whim, go into rabbit holes of satisfying curiosity, learn to use languages and tools that allow you to do in 3 lines of code what you needed 300 lines for yesterday. It feels like earning super powers sometimes.
And after all that, you can also make enough money to live comfortably in a nice apartment, small house, or just sleep in the woods if that’s your thing.
Since that day, I never considered being an employee, and just continued on doing my thing and creating stuff. This lead to the creation of https://lowtechguys.com/ and writing about my tech journeys on https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/
I’m still contemplating about building a house in the forest and start making Kaval flutes some day, but I think my tech skills will be a helpful aid for that goal, not something I want to leave by behind.
Instead of telling me that it will be better, he says that sometimes he contemplates buying a bar and just serving people and listening to their stories.
On that day I realized that not tech, but the idiotic company processes and the people I had to put up with were what got me into that state. I was hired as a Python backend developer, but I was also working as a Postgis expert (and I was no expert, I had no idea what I was doing), Go+gRPC integrator, Kube and Docker Swarm ops guy, frontend debugging person and I was in charge of the dev experience internal tools. It was simply too much to keep up with.
That same month I resigned and started working on selling my own product. 3 long months later, I launched the paid version of Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) and I again discovered why I like being in tech.
There’s a kind of freedom that you can rarely find in other domains. You can be creative, start ideas on a whim, go into rabbit holes of satisfying curiosity, learn to use languages and tools that allow you to do in 3 lines of code what you needed 300 lines for yesterday. It feels like earning super powers sometimes.
And after all that, you can also make enough money to live comfortably in a nice apartment, small house, or just sleep in the woods if that’s your thing.
Since that day, I never considered being an employee, and just continued on doing my thing and creating stuff. This lead to the creation of https://lowtechguys.com/ and writing about my tech journeys on https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/
I’m still contemplating about building a house in the forest and start making Kaval flutes some day, but I think my tech skills will be a helpful aid for that goal, not something I want to leave by behind.