I'm leaving my tech career

I don't know if it'll be forever, I give myself permission to backtrack, but as of now I am no longer a professional software developer.

I've been working with code since 2016. Initially out of necessity, with a design and marketing focus, it slowly became my career. By the end of 2017 I was calling myself a “web designer” and starting to get into Javascript, CMSs, React, animations and more ambitious projects. Although it was full of ungrateful grind and cheap clients, it was a joy.

But somewhere in the 2021 this fire started dying out.

I had “made it”: selling to ever-bigger international clients at a good USD rate and living in Brazil, starting to be recognized in my niche, and getting enough good feedback from client and readers to manage my impostor syndrome. But there wasn't much more to it than good financials and the occasional warm feeling of having helped strangers on the web.

Being so well-off was isolating and felt constricting, it came with a whole slew of shame and a good dose of the nihilistic “for what?!”. I don't need much, accumulating quickly leaves me without feeling empty inside, and donating felt like a vain attempt at justifying an existence devoid of meaning.

So I decided to have a time surplus instead, taking fewer clients and experimenting, reading and writing more. It worked for a while, but ultimately I was always gearing my “free time” towards work: becoming more efficient with endless self-help frameworks, producing content to build my personal brand, meditating and “healing” to be more resilient in my dedication to work.

The creative explorations were also rarely fulfilling: I was working solo and didn't have my friends for the ride anymore, no one around shared the interests I was exploring. I tried looking online for collaboration, but honestly the cultural and political gap meant I never truly connected to anyone. I met nice people and all, but not ones who I'd like to foster a true relationship with.

This did come with a cost that I still pay for today, though: I became chronically online, addicted to tech Twitter under the excuse of ~networking and ~keeping up-to-date. It was the life support to my plummeting desire at work, occasionally breathing joy and curiosity into my career in the shape of Andy Matuschak and his take on feral work, the Recurse Center and the awesome explorations of fellow recursers, the lofty ideals of the local-first software movement, and Effect's, EdgeDB's and XState's promises of robust and maintainable & powerful code that would lift all of my implementation woes.

But after 3.5 years of fighting reality, I'm now forced to see these attempts aren't enough to hold my interest and well-being. I've lost my appetite for learning, am constantly hyperactive and exhausted, doing the tasks I'm obligated to is increasingly harder, I'm developing a worrying compulsion to food, am feeling more solitary and isolated from people in my life, and now even the financials aren't working out. The well has dried and I have no motivation or energy to look for clients.

I've had so many hopes and dreams regarding my career in these past years - the Sanity.io course that I never wrote; the beautiful digital garden full of interesting, living ideas; the multitudes of apps that never went beyond prototypes, design documents or dreamy ideas; the trailblazing content on localfirst/edgedb/effectts/xstate/insert-hyped-tech-here; the conference talks and travels… I'm finally ready to let go of these, of facing reality and embracing the finitude of my time, energy and desire.

So, if you've followed my work over a portion of this time and wondered where did I go, why didn't I keep up, here's why.

I'm leaving tech and I thank all those who helped me along the way - both on the way in, inside the industry, and now on the way out. Not gonna lie, I may be back at a dev job in a few months - it still pays better than any other job I can think of. Eventually, material reality will hit. But at the very least I need to bury this “techfluencer” identity of mine and grow beyond its cage to actually be able to function.

I'm quitting Twitter, cancelling all of my productivity SaaS accounts, and I'll try to spend as little time on the computer as possible while I figure out what's next. I'll still code a bit here and there to bring some ideas to life, but mainly as a barefoot developer.

If you need to get a hang of me, I'm still accessible at henrique@hdoro.dev, especially if you want to offer me a grant to move Agroecology and regenerative agriculture forward with gororobas.com 😜