The grind is over#

Life has been busy in the last few months, which didn't leave me a lot of room to write. Still, I wanted to do a short update on a few little things.

Last April I switched roles at work and became a full time project & product manager. I've done project management part time before at this company, and had years of non-profit projects before so it doesn't feel really hard or new. For the product management role, I was already the UI/UX supervisor of the company, was already writing product proposals for clients, and overall often asking "shouldn't we do this instead?", so not a huge change too.

I think I make a bigger difference at this position than when I was a developer, and it's a great feeling. It has been very exhausting in the past two months tho, due to a client unreasonable behaviour. But I'm lucky to have a great team of developers, and great supervisor/bosses who actually get involved, provide feedback, and back me up in my decisions.

But the greatest and most unexpected feeling I got by switching roles was to stop being a developer. I genuinely loved the web, but my ten plus years as a developer were tinted by a constant grind and monitoring of my field. Read more newsletters, go to more events, code more personal projects. The fear of being replaceable and never doing enough led me to three burnouts, and a strong sense of dispossession of my true self, that I've been slowly trying to recover in the past few years.

Among the actions I've recently taken to free myself, one was to move away from Github. I moved all my projects to my own forgejo instance and finally deleted everything from my Github account. Maintaining a clean and professional looking Github account for recruiters, or even thinking about it, had been one of the most stressful things of my existence for years, and I'm glad it's finally over.

I felt an immense sense of relief and closure when it was done. The days of writing code for money are gone, and now I can just enjoy coding for pleasure in the cosiness of my own projects. The grind is over, and the burden is gone. Finally.