Hi, I'm Cesar, a Senior Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience.
In 2023, I got sick and burned out.
In 2024, I was laid off.
To recover, I went back to writing:
I resurrected my blog and my dev.to account.
It worked like free therapy by giving me a reason to get out of bed.
After hundreds of posts, I challenged myself to write a book.
That's how Street-Smart Coding was born:
A roadmap with 30 lessons I wish someone had told me when starting out.
Since then, Street-Smart Coding became book #2 of a 4-part series.
I already wrote a prequel, Street-Smart Manifesto and I'm working in a sequel, Street-Smart Coding in the Age of AI.
My goal is to shared everything I've learned the hard way in over 10 years.
I have planned another book, by the way.
In last July, I ran an AMA to celebrate my 7-year anniversary on dev.to:
And this week, to celebrate Street-Smart Coding first anniversary:
Ask me anything about coding, burnout, or writing.
I don't have all answers, tho.
Let me know if you participated in the last AMA.
Or simply stop by to say Hi.
Let's keep this conversation between humans, not between a human and an LLM.
Top comments (34)
Hi Cesar! Congratulations on your book's first anniversary!
I'm also interested in writing books, as I have three book ideas floating around in my head. I actually wrote the latest one completely by accident, if that's even possible! So I guess we'll see if there's any demand for it.
Do you have any advice on publishing a book?
As for burnout, I try to deal with it in two ways: physical activity (renovating my house) and participating in coding competitions, just like I did yesterday!
Don't start writing a book by writing a book: Start by validating the ideas before they become the table of content, and by growing an audience.
My rule is to do something for my body, mind, and spirit every day :)
Hi Cesar! 👋🏻
I'm recovering from burnout now, and writing works for me too! Writing morning pages was a turning point that helped me get through it. I also started writing my own book along the way. I think I just needed to step away from the tech world for a bit and rest, so I could organize my thoughts and find my place in it again.
My question for you is: what does your writing process look like, especially when writing a book? Do you freestyle your first draft, or do you start with a plan and stick to it?
I struggle with perfectionism as well, so whenever I write anything, I have to fight the urge to go back immediately and rewrite it into an "ideal paragraph". Any tips for beginner authors on how to escape this trap?
I try to make each book an experiment. But for most of them, I start by validating ideas as posts, emails, or social media posts. The top performing ones will eventually become book chapters, and the ones with less performance become supporting ideas. Then I like to write my books backwards: starting from a title, subtitle, promise, a 1-line summary, Amazon sales page...
I wrote about my last book experiment here. Hope you find it inspiring.
I will pass on a tip I learned from Nicolas Cole, a digital writer I follow: don't worry too much about editing. Instead of thinking in terms of a post, think in terms of your entire "library" of content. Volume wins over perfection.
Ohh and maybe these days of AI slop, some typos and imperfect sentences are the sign of human-written content :P
Happy 1st anniversary! Honestly, writing and publishing an actual coding book is just ridiculously cool. Turning a tough period of burnout into a tangible resource that other developers can learn from is such a major achievement. Huge respect for pushing through and making it happen Cesar :)
Thanks Maame, just like the Ancient said, it's now what happens, but how we react to it.
Thanks for stopping by! Happy coding!
No p! Happy coding :)
You're obviously a brave writer! Asking for comments at the risk of receiving none! (Well, at least, that's what would happen to me if I ran an AMA...)
Here's my question: how to fight the writer solitude in the age of immediate satisfaction through AI?
That has happened to me :/
That's something I struggle with. Yes, writing can feel lonely. Sometimes it feels we're shouting to the void. To fight it, I like to write something to help one person, and most of the time, that's my past self...or my future self. The other day, I read that if we write something we like, we only need one person to read it: oneself.
Good point!
What stands out to me is that writing didn't just help you recover; it gave you a reason to keep creating when life had knocked you off course. Turning that experience into a book, and then building on it with more, is meaningful.
Sometimes the thing that helps us rebuild ourselves ends up becoming something that helps other people too.
Absolutely! Helping others helps us find meaning too. For me, it was a combination of writing and seeing my posts resonate with the dev.to community.
which lesson from the 30 made the book?
Mmm I'm not sure I'm following your question...but my favorites are #15 (about async programming), #29 (about problem solving) and #30 (about getting fired) :)
which of the three gets quoted back most?
I haven't read or heard about any quotes, but the title resonates with a lot of people, that someone even called me "the Street-Smart Coding guy" so I stole it for my bio :)
the bio steal is the best part.
Happy first birthday to Street-Smart Coding! A question for the AMA: when you were coming back from the burnout and then the layoff, how did you tell "I need more rest" apart from "I need to start something"? Writing turned out to be the answer for you. Did you know that at the time, or only looking back?
At the peak of my burnout, I tried to negotiate a sick-leave, but my agency didn't allow it. And after the layoff, I couldn't find a job, so I chose the time between jobs as a sabbatical.
No. I only knew writing would take me somewhere else, but I didn't know where. Now that I connect the dots, that was something that gave me a sense of accomplishment and helped a lot to recover.
Calling the gap a sabbatical is a really practical move. Same months, but this way it's a stretch you chose. Makes sense that writing helped too, since it gave you something finished you could point to, which burnout and a stalled job hunt don't hand out much. Thanks for being this open about it.
What do you do to mitigate burnout these days?
And do you feel like burnout is more about having too much to do and too little time or about feeling like you have no agency in your work? For me it's the latter I think.
I feel like I am due for another burnout soon 😅
Congrats on the book anniversary!
I make sure I do something for my body, mind, and spirit every day. No excuses! Sometimes that's weight lifting, writing, and a moment of silence
Recently, I learned about burnout (exhaustion) and boreout (being bored to death). For me it was the second one, feeling I was working on things I didn't care about. I was doing too little of the things that really mattered to me.
Writing technical deep dives forces you to confront the ugly production trade-offs we usually bypass under sprint pressure, like eating a 10ms tail-latency penalty just to avoid maintaining complex lock-free state machines. The real edge case with documenting architectures is that textbook patterns almost always disintegrate the moment bare-metal kernel contention and memory fragmentation hit at scale. How often did you have to scrap an "elegant" code example because you knew it would immediately fold under real production traffic?
Bohdan Hordii // bohdanhordii.dev
Not very often :/ I learned the hard way to favor clear over clever code, code anyone can modify (even juniors)
Validating book ideas as posts first is a practical way to avoid writing a whole book nobody wants. Which of the 30 lessons surprised you most by how strongly readers responded to it?
I was surprised when someone called me "the Street-Smart Coding guy" I started to use that line in my bio since then.
That label sounds like a useful filter as well as a compliment. Has it changed the topics you say yes to, or do you still let a post earn its place even if it does not fit the street-smart framing? I am curious where you draw that line now.
I haven't changed my subject much. I always try to educate or entertain with every post. What I've changed is that now I introduce any of my books as the helpful next step on every post.