The story of unemployment peak for a software engineer

𝗜'𝘃𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝘂𝗻𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗮 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿.

Back in 2020, I wrote down my dream job: work remotely on a well-known open source project. I built toward it : freelance contracts, internships, real experience. I felt like I was on track.

Then the AI boom hit. Freelance dried up. Jobs disappeared.

I did what every unemployed engineer does: built SaaS products. Three of them. All failed. Built a mobile app. Also failed.

So I changed direction entirely. I made a list of Go open source projects and started contributing like I was employed by them. Got ghosted. PRs ignored. But eventually found one project where things clicked.

My PRs got merged. The feedback was great. The CTO offered me a contract to implement bidirectional gRPC streaming for remote debugging and integrated with the UI

Three months of hard work. It shipped to production.

Then the contract ended. And I was unemployed again.

That was almost a year ago.

AI keeps getting better. Being "just" a full-stack Go engineer doesn't feel like enough anymore. And I can't level up the normal way through work because I don't have work.

So here's my plan:

I bought 7 DevOps and platform engineering courses. I'm going to study all of them and build one real, useful project from scratch "𝗻𝗼 𝗔𝗜 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝘆 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗲, 𝗻𝗼 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘀, 𝗻𝗼 𝘁𝗼𝘆 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝘀".

I'll document everything. The learning. The building. The failures.

𝘞𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘪𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘮𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘺? 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗯𝗹𝘆 𝗻𝗼𝘁.
𝘞𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘪𝘵 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘮𝘦 𝘢 𝘫𝘰𝘣? 𝗠𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗲.

I'm doing it anyway. Because I love this. And because I refuse to give up.