DEV Community: Pablo

I Don't Have a Job, but I Am Working More Than Before

Pablo — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:51:25 +0000

Right now, I don't have a job.

Strangely, I feel like I am working more than when I had one.

There is no company waiting for me in the morning. No regular backlog, meetings, or manager asking what I am working on.

Still, my days fill up very quickly.

Looking for a job is already work

Job searching sounds simple when reduced to "sending applications."

In practice, it involves finding positions, reading descriptions, deciding which ones make sense, talking to recruiters, preparing for interviews, and keeping track of everything.

The difficult part is that this work has no natural finish line.

There might always be another interesting position to find or something I could improve before the next interview.

Without noticing, a few hours of job searching can become most of the day.

Then there are the side projects

At the same time, I have personal projects I want to keep building.

They give me something concrete to work on, keep me active as a developer, and, more importantly, I enjoy building them.

Of course, software projects are very good at creating more software projects.

Fix one bug and discover two others. Build a feature and immediately think of three improvements.

Then things get a little out of hand.

So somehow, unemployment has not produced much free time.

Creating my own boundaries

A regular job provides some external structure. Even if work sometimes escapes those boundaries, there is usually a clearer distinction between working and not working.

Now I have to create that distinction myself.

That is harder than I expected.

Having more available time creates pressure to use it. I could search for more opportunities, learn something new, improve a project, fix another bug, or prepare for an interview.

There is no shortage of useful things to do.

But "useful" does not mean "needs to be done today."

That distinction has become important.

Mental health is part of this too

I am trying not to treat taking care of my mind as something that can wait until I find another job.

This period needs limits too.

I cannot solve my career, finish my projects, learn everything I want to learn, and plan the next few years at the same time.

A productive day does not need to consume the whole day. A personal project does not need to become another full-time job just because I have more hours available. And taking some time away from the job search does not mean I am ignoring it.

I am still figuring out the right balance.

For now, I don't think the goal is to stay busy until another job appears.

I Ended Up Building an AI Development Pipeline

Pablo — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:49:31 +0000

I have ideas when I am working, at the gym, or walking the dog. If I notice something to fix in one of my personal projects, I want to say:

“I need to fix the account editing flow. Not now.”

Then I want to forget about it until I have time.

So I connected ChatGPT to TickTick. I can describe a task, and ChatGPT creates a short title with the right project tag. If I say “later,” it goes to Backlog. If I say “maybe,” it goes to Not Sure.

That was supposed to be the whole thing.

Then I had another idea: what if I say the agent can start?

A task is not permission to write code

TickTick is where I keep my plans. Some tasks are uncertain. Some may never become code. I do not want every thought I have while walking the dog to start changing a repository.

So the words matter:

“Add this for later” creates a planning task.
“Maybe we should do this” keeps it uncertain.
“You can do it now” authorizes engineering work.

For that last case, I want ChatGPT to create a GitHub Issue with enough context for a coding agent to pick it up. The agent follows the repository’s instructions, implements the change, tests it, and opens a Pull Request for me to review.

flowchart TD
    A["Me, from my phone"] --> B["ChatGPT"]
    B --> C["TickTick: my plans"]
    B -->|When I authorize work| D["GitHub Issue"]
    D --> E["Coding agent"]
    E --> F["Pull Request for my review"]

Am I reinventing something?

I wondered about that. GitHub already has coding agents that can take an Issue and open a PR. The Issue → agent → PR part is an existing pattern.

The part I care about is what happens before the Issue exists. I speak naturally, and the system needs to understand whether I am saving an idea or asking for work to begin. Creating a task should never silently become permission to change code.

I also started building a runner on my own computer. The idea is for it to pick up Issues marked ready for an agent and run Codex using my local clones and the rules in each repository. I am testing that now. The first runs have already exposed problems with CLI flags, Windows commands, branches, and recovery. So I cannot say this works end to end yet.

Those problems are frustrating, but they are also teaching me what a reliable queue needs. What happens when an agent fails? Can it skip that Issue and continue with the next one? How does it avoid doing the same work twice? How do I know what is still running?

Where I want this to go

I want to notice a problem, say “add this for later” or “the agent can start,” and get back to what I was doing. The repository decides how the code work is done. I review the PR before it becomes part of the project.

Maybe a ready-made tool will eventually do this whole flow. For now, building my own version is helping me understand where the hard parts are.

I started by trying to make TickTick a little easier to use from my phone. Somehow I ended up debugging an agent runner on my PC. Things got out of hand pretty quickly.

Links I Saved for Later

Pablo — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 16:27:24 +0000

I found some old posts with useful links. I’m keeping these three here so I can find them again:

This is a small collection for now. I may add notes as I revisit each link.

Things I Was Unprepared For As A Lead Developer

Pablo — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 16:10:11 +0000

Need to store some data?

Pablo — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 18:59:42 +0000

https://blog.codepen.io/2018/06/07/need-to-store-some-data/

Karma Chromium Driver

Pablo — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 16:05:54 +0000

The problem: karma "ChromeHeadless have not captured"

As a solution try to:

brew install --cask chromium

==> Installing Cask chromium
==> Moving App 'Chromium.app' to '/Applications/Chromium.app'
==> Linking Binary 'chromium.wrapper.sh' to '/opt/homebrew/bin/chromium'
🍺  chromium was successfully installed!

Remember to allow Chromium at Security & Privacy.

Debugging PHP with XDebug and VsCode

Pablo — Mon, 31 May 2021 14:24:45 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNIvugvmCyQ
http://xdebug.org/wizard

At .bash_profile add export XDEBUG_CONFIG="idekey=VSCODE"

.vscode/launch.json

"configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Listen for Xdebug",
            "type": "php",
            "request": "launch",
            "port": 9000
        },
        {
            "name": "Launch currently open script",
            "type": "php",
            "request": "launch",
            "program": "${file}",
            "cwd": "${fileDirname}",
            "port": 9000,
            "runtimeExecutable": "/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php8.0.0/bin/php"
        }
    ]

/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php8.0.0/conf/php.ini

[xdebug]
  zend_extension = /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php8.0.0/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20200930/xdebug.so
  xdebug.mode=debug
  xdebug.start_with_request=yes
  xdebug.remote_enable=1
  xdebug.remote_autostart=1
  xdebug.client_port = 9000
  xdebug.client_host = "127.0.0.1"
  xdebug.idekey = VSCODE

node modules

Pablo — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 22:11:25 +0000

madge

Madge is a developer tool for generating a visual graph of your module dependencies, finding circular dependencies, and give you other useful info. Joel Kemp's awesome dependency-tree is used for extracting the dependency tree.

npm-check-updates

Upgrades your package.json dependencies to the latest versions, ignoring specified versions.

WiFi Boost?

Pablo — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 13:55:20 +0000

I'm having a bad time with my WiFi connection when I'm attending to video calls.

I'm not sure the main issue, I have two laptops (Windows and Mac) and the problem seems to happen mostly on Windows, where I constantly have lags when I start to speak (not so much when I'm just listening).

I did some changes on Windows, but it still crap. Now I'm doing some changes on my modem:

Disable: Enable Energy Saving (System Tools > Advanced Power Management)
Change from Automatic Channel to 1, 6 or 11. Why Channels 1, 6 and 11?

Let's see what will happen.

Test Speed

Angular Tests

Pablo — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 13:29:31 +0000

I'm trying to figure it out why I'm getting DISCONNECTED while running my tests.

So I did this to see what's been tested:

npm i karma-spec-reporter --save-dev

karma.conf.js

plugins: [require('karma-spec-reporter'), ...],

reporters: ['spec', ...],

specReporter: {
    maxLogLines: 5, // limit number of lines logged per test
    suppressErrorSummary: true, // do not print error summary
    suppressFailed: false, // do not print information about failed tests
    suppressPassed: false, // do not print information about passed tests
    suppressSkipped: true, // do not print information about skipped tests
    showSpecTiming: false // print the time elapsed for each spec
},

https://stackoverflow.com/a/58202615/1958882

And added this:

captureTimeout: 210000,
browserDisconnectTolerance: 3, 
browserDisconnectTimeout : 210000,
browserNoActivityTimeout : 210000,

https://github.com/jasmine/jasmine/issues/1413#issuecomment-334247097

browsers: ["Chrome-headless"],
customLaunchers: {
    "Chrome-headless": {
        base: 'Chrome',
        flags: [
            '--no-sandbox',
            '--disable-gpu',
            '--enable-logging',
            '--no-default-browser-check',
            '--no-first-run',
            '--disable-default-apps',
            '--disable-popup-blocking',
            '--disable-translate',
            '--disable-background-timer-throttling',
            '--disable-renderer-backgrounding',
            '--disable-device-discovery-notifications',
            '--remote-debugging-port=9222',
            '--disable-web-security',
            '--watch=false'
        ]
    }
},

https://github.com/jasmine/jasmine/issues/1413#issuecomment-432112670

And still, this damn thing it's not working... 😡

Avoid karma tests running twice on autoWatch

autoWatch: false,

https://pracucci.com/avoid-karma-tests-run-twice-on-autowatch.html

Bitbucket Pipeline: Heroku

Pablo — Sat, 01 Aug 2020 15:50:42 +0000

In my little cozy world, for many times just because it's working I keep doing it the lazy way.

When I knew about Heroku and how to deploy a app, I thought that nothing could get better and for a long time I was deploying from my terminal.

Today I tried deploy through Bitbucket Pipelines and as dumb as it seems it took me a while to figure it out how to setup the bitbucket-pipelines.yml file.

// get the `HEROKU_API_KEY`
$ heroku auth:token

# https://bitbucket-pipelines.prod.public.atl-paas.net/validator

clone:
 depth: full

pipelines:
 branches:
   master:
     - step:
         name: Deploy
         caches:
           - node
         script:
           - git push -f https://heroku:$HEROKU_API_KEY@git.heroku.com/$HEROKU_APP_NAME.git master --no-verify

With this, you'll get to Build succeeded! in a way that your mom would be very proud (because she doesn't understand a thing but she thinks that only you could have done it).

How do you keep your NPM packages update?

Pablo — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 10:17:38 +0000

You have multiple projects going on and if you keep them always update to the last version, sometimes you expend some precious time trying to figure it out what and why your build broke (after the update).

Normally when I update I run npm-update, which it's a package that search for all last versions from your dependencies.

I don't know if this is a good practice, but I like to keep my dependencies always at the last version.

So... how do you manage this?