A slow retrospective on a season of writing, and the quiet transition now opening between fatigue, clarity, and the return to earth.
Some life chapters end without a final scene.
No slammed door, no staged farewell, no single sentence that closes the book.
They finish the way dusk finishes: a slow dilution of light, almost unnoticed, until you realise the room has changed colour.
This text is that kind of dusk.
It records the suspension — not the death — of a cycle I never scheduled: three months during which writing became as involuntary as breathing, and twenty essays arrived the way dreams arrive, uninvited but insistent.
Today the tide has withdrawn.
To understand where it went, I have to retrace how it arrived.
1. How it began: writing to think, thinking to stay upright
I came to dev.to without a plan, a metric, or a slogan.
I carried only a handful of questions that had been turning in my hands for years:
- Why does the tech industry fear simplicity?
- Why does complexity feel safer than clarity?
- Why do we applaud solutions that glow more than they solve?
I started with fragments.
A paragraph at dawn, a sentence between meetings, a question typed into the notes app while the metro stood still in a tunnel.
I was not trying to teach; I was trying to keep my balance.
The page was a handrail.
Outside the screen, the corridor was darkening: repeated injustices at work, decisions that made no sense, an exhaustion that accumulated like sediment in a jar.
Every morning a little more sand at the bottom.
Writing became the only way to see the sand clearly, to name its colour, to keep the jar from cracking.
I published almost by accident.
The first post felt like leaving a diary open on a café table.
But someone sat down, read, and answered.
Then someone else.
The circle widened without noise, the way ripples widen when the stone is small.
2. Finding a voice: staying close to what actually works
After a few weeks I noticed a cadence.
Not a style — I still had no ambition to be stylish — but a stance:
- stay close to the essential
- speak only of what I have touched, compiled, broken, repaired
- refuse the glitter of buzzwords
The topics rose like damp spots on a wall, showing where the water was pooling:
- why some systems hold while others quietly rot;
- how databases become the unconscious of an organisation;
- why RAG, stripped of marketing, is mostly a question of plumbing;
- why technical sobriety looks like weakness from the outside and like oxygen from the inside;
- why migrating WordPress is never trivial once real URLs, real users, real scars are involved.
I never tried to be provocative.
I simply described the toolbox without the cathedral.
Perhaps that is why a few readers recognised the voice immediately: it sounded like the voice they used when talking to themselves at 2 a.m., the debugger still running in the other tab.
3. A modest but attentive audience — and connections that matter
I never counted thousands.
I counted rereaders: people who returned with a second question, a missing comma, a memory of their own.
One of them was Sylwia.
Her comments always arrived a day later, as though the text needed to ferment in her before she answered.
She noticed what I had hidden between two sentences the way one notices a hairline crack in a cup.
Our exchanges were not comment threads; they were slow tennis rallies, each ball carrying a little more spin, a little more precision.
That kind of reading changes how you write: you begin to leave spaces on purpose, confident that the right eye will fill them.
dev.to became, for a season, a quiet courtyard.
Not a stage, not a marketplace — just a few benches placed in the shade.
We sat, we read, we spoke.
Then evening came, and we each went home without applause.
4. Writing as mirror
Looking back, the articles were not production; they were echography.
Each paragraph scanned an organ the way a doctor slides the probe across skin:
here the liver of unresolved conflict,
here the spleen of accumulated fatigue,
here the heart still pumping clarity in a body that refused to collapse.
Writing let me watch the organs in real time.
It also let me watch the watching.
I could see the moment when a sentence began to resist, when the pulse of language lost its regularity.
The mirror was starting to fog.
5. When the body speaks: cooking, slowing, returning to earth
One morning I lit the stove.
Not for the heat, not for the taste — for the slowness.
Lentils in cold water at nine.
Onions, carrots, a bay leaf, nothing more.
By eleven the smell had settled into the walls like a cat that refuses to leave.
By two the pot was still murmuring, a low bubble every thirty seconds, the culinary equivalent of a long exhale.
I stirred once, maybe twice.
Time moved like broth — clear, but never empty.
A year ago I could not lift a knife.
Now I was watching steam write itself onto the window in reverse calligraphy.
The body, without warning, had taken the pen.
6. Refuge changes shape: from words to code
For three months the page had been the only room where the floor stayed level.
Then the boards began to tilt.
Sentences arrived late, panting.
Metaphors missed the train.
What had been refuge became labour.
At the same hour — almost to the minute — code began to glow again.
Not the heroic code of keynote slides, but the small, certain logic of functions that return what they promise.
A place where errors throw, where tests turn red, where you fix, push, move on.
A landscape without fog.
The refuge had not disappeared; it had simply moved house.
I followed, suitcase in hand, no resentment in my throat.
7. A long-dormant legaltech project wakes up
For years a legaltech idea had been sleeping on a shelf, wrapped in the dust of postponed hope.
It had started as a personal bruise: watching a system lose itself inside its own procedures, seeing coherence sacrificed to ceremony.
The bruise never faded; it waited.
In recent weeks it has begun to stir.
Where articles now ask for energy, the repository gives it back.
Where words hesitate, pull-requests merge.
The concrete is reclaiming its rights, brick by brick.
I do not know yet if the tool will heal the wound.
I only know that building feels like breathing again.
8. The pivot text: the one that tied every layer together
Among the twenty essays, one acted as keystone: the piece about justice 🇫🇷.
It had been drafted months earlier, but I kept it locked — too personal, too raw, too close to the bone.
When I finally released it, I felt the arc complete:
architecture, simplicity, databases, field truth, all converging on the same question — how does one navigate a system drowning in its own procedures?
After it was published, I sat in silence for a long while.
Not the silence of emptiness, but the silence that follows the last page of a book, when you close the cover and let the story settle.
For the first time, stopping felt possible — not as surrender, as arrival.
9. Why I’m pausing now
There are calendar reasons: two appointments in November and December that may open or close entire corridors of life.
There is also the simpler reason: the tide has asked to turn, and I have learned not to argue with tides.
I pause because
- the fatigue is real
- the legaltech project needs the energy that articles once gave
- code is calling with a voice I recognise
- writing must become a free gesture again, not a scheduled chore
I stop before the sentence becomes obligation, before the source is drained, before the door slams instead of simply closing with a click.
This is not goodbye.
This is breathing room.
10. What these three months taught me
Writing clarifies — but only until clarity asks for a different vessel.
Publishing creates connection — and connection sometimes whispers: pause.
The quality of readers weighs more than their number.
Important topics arrive on their own schedule; the only necessary invitation is honesty.
Fatigue is not weakness — it is the body’s editor, suggesting the next draft.
A chapter can end without fireworks; a closed laptop is sometimes the most elegant curtain fall.
I do not know when words will return.
I only know they will — perhaps elsewhere, perhaps changed, perhaps after a winter I have not yet named.
I leave the door ajar.
Thank you
To everyone who read.
To those who came back, article after article, comment after comment.
To Sylwia, whose presence was a quiet lighthouse throughout the season.
To the silent ones who sent private mails, to the restless ones who argued in good faith, to the tired ones who found a bench in these paragraphs.
Thank you for lending your attention, your patience, your nights.
This writing period existed.
It still does — somewhere between the lentil pot and the waiting code.
Top comments (6)
Hi Pascal,
Thank you for your posts and for the thoughtful discussions we’ve shared - they’ve been genuinely inspiring to read. It makes complete sense that after such an intense creative period, there comes a moment to pause and recharge. The end of the year is naturally a time for reflection and slowing down.
I’ll be following along and looking forward - patiently - to whatever you decide to write next when the time is right.
Wishing you a restful season ahead!
To Sylwia
Thank you for these words — and for the subtle repetition that reminds me even the best texts sometimes carry a duplicate in the buffer.
You’ve understood exactly what this pause is about: not so much a stop as a recentering, a return to the rhythm of the body and of code. Our exchanges have been a compass during these months of writing. Your way of reading — slow, deep, attentive to the cracks — has changed the way I write.
I’m turning back toward the concrete, toward functions that return what they promise, toward the legaltech project that’s been waiting its turn. Words will return, but only when they’re ready, and light.
Until then, I’ll carry your patience like a companion.
Wishing you a gentle winter.
You describe writing and coding as separate refuges that tides move between. Are you sure they aren't just two expressions of the same underlying need for clarity?
That’s a beautifully sharp question — and I think you’ve touched the heart of something I’ve felt but haven’t fully named.
You’re right: both writing and coding are, in essence, acts of making sense.
They’re two different grammars for the same deep need: to structure thought, to bring order to chaos, to translate the mess of experience into something that holds.
But if I try to distinguish them — and maybe this is where the “tide” metaphor holds — I’d say:
Writing feels like mapping.
It’s exploratory, open-ended. It allows ambiguity, rhythm, silence.
It’s how I understand what I don’t yet know.
Coding feels like building.
It’s declarative, logical, constrained by syntax and runtime.
It’s how I make what I’ve understood usable.
In that sense, they’re not separate refuges — they’re different rooms in the same house.
Sometimes I need the window view (writing).
Sometimes I need the foundation (code).
But you’re right: underneath both lies the same search for clarity.
What shifts, perhaps, is not the need, but the mode that meets it — and the body’s way of saying, “Enough mapping. Time to build.”
Thank you for asking this.
It makes the transition feel less like a departure, and more like a change of tools.
Ah, I know you’re already in your well-deserved break mode, but this comment of yours is just too fascinating to ignore 😄 It’s incredible how differently our minds work. For me, coding and writing feel like two versions of the same creative act — almost indistinguishable. And whenever I get the chance to write about what I’m building or explain the ideas behind the code, I get a turbo-boost of energy and suddenly my motivation jumps by +1000%
What surprises me the most is that I only discovered this after nearly ten years in the industry.
You’re right—even in a pause, some threads remain alive, and yours is one I’m glad to pick up.
What you describe resonates deeply, even if my own rhythm feels different.
That “turbo-boost” you feel when writing about what you build—I recognize it, too.
It’s that moment when explanation becomes an extension of creation, when words don’t just describe the code, but complete it.
And yet—how strange and beautiful that we can walk similar paths and still experience them so differently.
For you, writing and coding blur into one motion.
For me, they’re distinct breaths: one in, one out.
But maybe that’s precisely what makes a conversation like ours worthwhile: we meet not in sameness, but in recognition.
You said it took ten years to notice this about yourself.
It makes me wonder what else we’re still learning, quietly, even after years in the same field.
Perhaps the most honest creative process is the one we’re still figuring out.
Thank you—once again—for looking so closely, and for sharing what you see.