Let me start by introducing myself shortly (I promise!).
I'm a 25-year-old frontend-heavy software developer who has been coding since I was 13. I have more than five years of experience and I'm obsessed with the idea of programming.
I got laid off a month ago, and it was a weird experience for me. It's the first time in my life that I've been unemployed. I've worked in the field since I was 19. I didn't even go to university because of the pandemic; I didn't want to lose time there while I could be earning money.
After the layoff, I felt a little purposeless. I didn't know what to do, and I've been living in my own place for the last two years, so I need to earn money to pay rent. The money I have won't keep me going for more than eight months.
My mind immediately went into survival mode. Every day I had new ideas and daydreamed a lot. I started four projects, then quit them after two or three days because they were only meant to give me more experience outside frontend development. I realized that when I was learning something new, I was mostly just learning syntax and libraries.
For instance, I sat down and started learning Swift and SwiftUI as a TypeScript developer. After three hours of reading docs and topics, I realized it was nearly the same as frontend development. I had no reason to build something with it just to prove that I could. Now we have agents: when you know the architecture, you can guide an agent to write code for you. As an experienced developer, it's not that hard to read another language or library.
Last week, I sat down and started reading about PostgreSQL and, surprisingly, I got hooked. I know how to write a backend server and theoretically understand how a service should behave, how its architecture must be coded, how middleware must be handled, and how queries must be efficient. But learning Postgres was exciting; finally, it was something my mind was not already familiar with.
##Let's get to the curtains
Two days ago, I visited my friend, who works with her father in their family's local curtain business. We started talking about how bad the job market is right now, and how every job application means competing with more than a thousand other people. Then I said to her, "I could work for you hourly if you'd like, preferably five hours a day." She was okay with it.
I learned the job in just one day and started making pleated curtains the next day. Oh my God, I realized how much less brain fog you get from doing a repetitive physical task. It feels like a kind of meditation: you're not thinking hard to fix a problem, but thinking about how to produce something faster and with fewer mistakes.
It felt like a `Celeste` speedrun. I'm obsessed with Celeste because playing it makes my mind peaceful. I know the rooms and where the platforms are, but every time I play, I think about how I can be faster and more efficient to finish a run. When I fail and replay the same room, I still enjoy it because every retry makes me a better player. Making curtains by hand felt like that.
I still program, though. That's why I work five hours a day. But five hours of manufacturing something is better than doom-scrolling through Reddit and Hacker News.