Have you considered switching careers rather than quiting. I took a two year break from tech and did English teaching. The pay was low but it sustained me with my savings and I had tons of mental energy to work on my side projects. Any job that's easy to clock in and clock out, where the work gets done on the same day, no deadlines. Can do wonders for your mental energy.
When I returned to tech I had a pretty impressive portfolio of projects. Turns out unsurprisingly that not coding all day for work makes me want to code more for fun.
Thank you so much for the suggestion. I’ve thought about it, but I don’t feel like I have any strong skills outside of coding. I can draw decently as an amateur, but not at a professional level.
I genuinely love coding and often do it in my spare time. My burnout isn’t caused by coding itself but rather by poor management and working on assignments that feel meaningless.
In that case, switching employers may be what's needed, rather than switching careers (I know, easier said than done but easier if you already have a job). But if you do switch careers or have a career break, you can still code! If you're not maintaining a big project, working on your own side-projects is more like a hobby than work for most coders I know, so it wouldn't necessarily be incompatible with a break from the industry.
I get that. Honestly I never thought I was skilled enough to teach until I tried it. There are a lot of jobs out there that are easy to learn and adapt to.
Before teaching I did a cleaning job which was satisfying. Headphones in and end my day with the satisfaction of a clean office for the workers tomorrow. City gardening jobs were also lovely. Being out in the sun does wonders for mood. Impossible to get stressed doing the job.
But yeah, it's always scary that bad management can ruin a good thing.
This is a simple and great idea. I do something similar with my website. My newsletter is just a list of emails I have in a .txt file. I email to everyone when I write a blog post and we chat through email exchanges about it. The interactions feel more in-depth, and as you say, less performative as the exchange is just between us. Now I'm thinking of adding an email link at the end of every blog post with the blog title.
Personally, I wouldn't consider a blog without a newsfeed usable, newsletters are the wrong tool IMO (select push vs pull available to everyone without maintenance).
Working on letting users upload their own transparent fashion images to a web app that let's you use your camera to apply the world to characters clothing. I made it for an exhibition in Kyoto and it was a lot of fun. Hoping to expand on it a bit more.
I just started getting into blogging. It was really easy to setup my own site with a blog section using Astro. I've been tempted to add analytics to the website but I find that these kind of stats just cause me mental stress. So it's purely a space for me to shout into the void and it feels so refreshing not caring about vanity metrics.
I did the same with SvelteKit on Github pages but put it behind CloudFlare. That gives me a little validation that more than five people are visiting it a month, without the fine grained statistics or privacy violation of using an analytics package like Google Whatever It’s Called Now.
While not as diverse as the US, Singapore is a melting pot of cultures and religions and is arguably safer and cleaner than Japan. Singling it out to diversity simplifies the issue. It's a million other choices and policies that made the US what it is today.
Singapore has a mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people (with plenty of ethnic Europeans thrown in for good measure). They’re a mix of Buddhist, Christian, Islamic and Hindu religions.
All that in a space smaller than many American cities. If that doesn’t qualify as a melting pot, I don’t know what does.
As a non-American, Hispanic, white, and black American people in the USA are all "American, American, American", and not really a melting pot if that's the only ethnic groups you're counting.
Wow. Doubling down eh? At this point I have to assume you’re trolling because I struggle to believe anyone could be this obviously racist and/or stupid.
The US is a mix of ethnic Europeans, Africans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, including ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people, and many others besides that.
That's a melting pot.
Singapore is described as "a mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people".
That's not a melting pot.
Those are two different things. I don't care one bit if you think it is racist or stupid to point out the difference.
I know this goes against your deeply held beliefs but race is socially constructed. I've heard Americans refer to Italians, Turks and Slavic - and even Roma people - as "white" but tell a German that and they'll look at you with confusion. Tell them that Hispanics are more foreign to you, a white American, than Spaniards are to them, a white German and they'll just think you've lost the plot. Heck, go and tell a Japanese person they're interchangeable with Malaysians and Indians and see how they feel about it. Even throwing Indians and East Asians in one racial category seems frankly insane to me as a European for reasons that should be obvious if you've ever seen them let alone talked to them (and even superficial racism you can use to group all "black" people together doesn't explain it as a Punjab Indian person and a Han Chinese person share no obvious visual features).
China, Malaysia and India are culturally and ethnically extremely different. Heck, India and China alone span enough area to cover extremely distinct ethnic and cultural groups themselves. The reason "white" Americans think they're a distinct unified group from "Africans", "Hispanics", "Asians" and so on is that the US largely eroded the cultural differences over the centuries to the point "cultural origin" has become more of a costume than a meaningful identity - if you're an American descendent of German settlers, you're an American, not a German and Germans (except for the most ideologically driven völkisch nationalists) will humor you but never see you as "one of them" more than any other foreigner.
You know what Africans call a black American? American. You know what Asians call an Asian American? American. The US is a melting pot, alright, but it is a racially segregated one and that's what makes you think the races matter. The US dragged itself kicking and streaming to the point where it even acknowledged black people as actual people and abolished all the mandatory racial seggregation laws that were put in place by white Americans who felt icky about having to share space with former Untermenschen slaves. The Chinese specifically were the first group of people the US actively tried to prevent from immigrating (which was later expanded to all people from East Asia).
You're also ignoring that Singapore is only half the size of Texas while having a similar number of people living in it. The US has had a wide range of immigrants but they tended to cluster in different places. Comparing Singapore and the US is apples to oranges but not because you think Asian people are a coherent group outside of racial shenanigans. I know this isn't very "politically correct" for me to say but: Yes, your racism is intellectually insulting but it has also successfully impaired your comprehension of demographics, sociology and ethnic groups to that point that you're not even wrong[0].
Great website. I discovered a lot of incredible artists and since they have generous creative commons licences, I was able to use them in some games I made. Finding music that ties the experience together is really satisfying.
I'm not sure if they have fixed it but Windsurf downgraded significantly over the last month. Check out the Codeium subreddit. Many people have given up on it and are switching to cursor. Kind of a shame because Windsurf really did feel like magic when it launched.
I also have a really hard time relating to the the whole financial independence / retire early crowd. I think I'd rather take the chance on growing as much as I can now so that I can be the wise person I want to be when I'm much older. Prioritizing experiences rather than aggressive saving. I figure the worst case is that I'm old living an extremely frugal life in a tiny place in the middle of nowhere Japan (where I currently live) reading books and playing all the games I bought when I was young, happily content with a life fully lived.
I recently went on a very personal international trip that wiped all my savings. I was able to reconnect with my culture and I made two friends who I cherish so much. The kind of friends that I would drop everything to help. I didn't have to go on these trips, I could have kept saving. But I don't regret that experience at all and it changed me immensely.
reply