This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.
By Arceus, what a year!
At the beginning of 2024, I was at a crossroads: what do I do with my professional life? After 20 years of IT work, I didn't know exactly where to go or what to do, which was piling up my anxieties. I already knew the DEV site and one day I decided to write about it.
It's not one of my best posts, nor is a great content, but what I thought would be received with aggressivity and bad opinions was actually well received. For the first time in years, the passion for writing that I had woke up inside of me.
Then, I wrote about the pros and cons of having a home server, which got really nice reviews and comments! I was on fire, writing here, writing on Medium, creating posts on Linkedin, and even creating a WordPress plugin that automatically creates AI content-generated posts.
Heck, I was on fire, joining a lot of different DEV challenges, and even winning one in April! I even joined the mentor program of DEV to help some juniors in May! It was a crazy start to the year!
But then, LIFE happened.
I won't enter into details, but in the same way that DEV had to cut some personal staff mid-year, I also lost a bunch of revenue and clients in June, and had to deal with one of my cat's disease, which led to her passing away in November. So, again, a lot of professional and personal challenges got in the way of what I like to do: write and create things.
This doesn't mean that I stopped working with what I like. I still do a lot of AI-related work that is different from what I did in the past, and WAY more challenging. I just... stopped making things for fun. Which is OK.
For my achievements, I got almost 15k followers on DEV. Won a contest. Got to know a bunch of cool people in this community, as colleagues, as a mentor, and as a student. Also, learned how to cook different things, but I don't know if it matters 🤔
For the lessons learned: it's never too late to do what you love or to make what you do more for a living in sync with what you love. After my burnout in 2019, I believed I was finished. Now I know that I was just tired.
For what I want in 2025... Well, that's another history, for another post.
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