"I don’t know if I can do it again."
It was late 2024. A truly challenging year for me personally, and a disorienting one professionally.
AI making increasingly pessimistic headlines around the only career I had known for over 18 years: technology. Hacker News, Reddit, Substack, X, YouTube, all filled with titles that meant little to nothing to me: Agentic, Context Windows, RAG, RAG is dead, MCP. I had been using ChatGPT since February 2023, but still treated it like a sometimes magical yet unpredictable and unreliable Google. And the headlines seemed to point to one conclusion: some collection of poorly understood terms was collectively spelling out the death of coding as we know it.
Dozens of languages and technologies over the years, most now obsolete. As a kid, it was building desktop apps with Visual Basic 3.0, writing scripts in Perl and TCL.
The first dollars I earned in tech came from obsessing handwritten HTML 4.01 + CSS 2.0, and then my mind was blown when I was introduced to <? include(“"); ?>.
Remember Macromedia Adobe Flash? My first fulltime technology job was designing “advanced” interactive Flash websites for auto dealerships with a Digital Marketing agency. Then iPhone came out and Steve Jobs killed Flash, and just like that, I was back to the drawing board. All of the Actionscript patterns I had learned were now wasted space in my brain.
Sure, many principles and concepts are evergreen, but I was still back to the drawing board moving into another 4 year cycle spent in the world of LAMP and jQuery web app development for a Healthtech Social Media platform.
After PHP (I’m sorry world), it was Python.
By 2017 the next shift was treating AWS and cloud computing as a platform, not just a VPS provider. Infrastructure as Code and seeing servers as Cattle vs. pets, a big leap for someone who once racked bare metal by hand in data centers!
Then 2019 brought me into the world of Kubernetes, and the cycle started again.
In my teens, encountering new technologies and stacks was fun. In my 20’s, with a young family depending on me, it was doable and necessary. But as time went on, each shift became more stressful, each new collection of technologies became more threatening. By my late 30’s I was just burnt out. The spark of creation that got me into computing as a pre-teen was all but extinguished. The excitement I once felt of simply taking an idea and seeing it come to life was increasingly choked out by red tape, endless meetings and scrum ceremonies, cross-team dependencies and office politics. Ideas that should take an “agile” (ha!) team a couple of weeks stretched out to quarters or even years.
And the rest of life was getting heavier too. Both my wife and I had serious health events occur in our immediate family. Three of our kids were now teenagers. We made a pretty significant relocation after almost a decade in the city to the deep rural countryside. Starting over was no longer an adventure, it was something I was absolutely dreading.
"I don’t know if I can do it again.”
I started saying this to my wife in 2024 as I started realizing another seismic shift was happening in my field. Was it time for a career shift? What transferable skills did I even have after decades in one world? Did I even enjoy technology anymore?
Cue the millennial trope of thinking maybe it was time to start a brewery...