Billions must watch 『リリイ・シュシュのすべて』

European programming languages are better than American ones.

Hedgehog.

What goes up must come down.

The second month was a complete disaster. Couldn't focus. I used to rack up 200 hours a month but in the second month I only worked 108.66. This wasn't that bad because I am currently just a contractor and even though I worked so little I implemented some pretty cool features. They were very understanding and we tried to come up with a solution to this situation together with our CTO. But still, I should be more reliable than this.

This, the third, month is the end of "trial" period. We'll see how it goes. I recovered from some pretty harsh shit in my life but this might be my breaking point.

OK Career

I almost forgot that this month marks the fourth year of my professional career.

Though I’m too young for "back in my day" stories, I’m glad I began so early. I was employed before the mass layoffs and have had a stable, uninterrupted career ever since. I didn’t have to go through the hassle of being an intern, and I always got paid on time, too. I'm also glad that I started working before the ChatGPT era and actually made use of StackOverflow and other forums, and I read the documentation. It was painful and stressful when the deadlines were tight, but it was worth it nonetheless.

In these years, excluding freelancing, I worked at four places: local startup, local government, local startup, and a global startup. I'm glad that I had this path as I was able to "err and err and err again but less and less and less".

At my first company, as I mentioned before, I started out straight away as a junior. I worked for a bowl of rice there, but it was a pretty good deal. At this company I was able to make most of the mistakes and I'm glad I did do them early. I was in charge of my first project and had the experience of leading (perhaps "decision-making for") a team. The project belly-flopped, and we ended up wasting about six months. Though this wasn't a big deal and investors realized that gathering together a bunch of juniors wasn't the best idea and started hiring more experienced people to the team. There are a lot of good stories to be told about this company and all of them won't fit into a single paragraph of this post. Let me know if you would like to read more about it, I might make a separate post. I mostly worked on the backend with Node.js, some Go and good "old" Java with Spring Boot and Camunda BPMN (I was on Java 17). Everything was going well, but unfortunately the company died due to lack of funding. I "graduated" from there as a mid-level developer.

After that, I was unemployed for about two months. At the time there were global mass layoffs. The local market wasn't any better either - it was very saturated. To be terse, I got a government job. Fuck the government job. Narcissistic, corrupt, incompetent and nepotism-riddled middle and upper management. My colleagues were good people though. I was at my lowest there. In fact, I hadn't posted about my sadness prior in this channel as I wanted to keep this channel professional. Welp. I worked there for exactly a year. Never doing this again. Better be unemployed than work for the government. Mostly worked on the frontend with React and did some backend work with Node.js. That's all I have to say about this job.

Afterwards, a former colleague and mentor referred me to a startup ("saved" might be more accurate) as a senior developer. I got a significant salary increase. Mostly used Node.js and Go and overall was happy there. Got the chance to apply Alloy 6 too. This was my first fully remote job with a flexible schedule. I loved every moment of working there. Good colleagues, good management (there were hardly any managers in a classical sense as they could and did write code too) and a good boss. I arrived like a wet cat but left as a fully confident, competent, and pragmatic person.

I wouldn't ever even think of leaving the previous company but while browsing Haskell discourse I came across a Haskell job opportunity in a similar global company. I didn't expect to get in at all but applied anyways. What was the worst that could happen, anyway? Little did I know that this was arguably one of the best things that ever happened in my life. I applied at the start of this year but got an interview in late March. To cut to the chase, here I am now. Using Haskell, knowledge of type theory and compiler engineering at work.

I'm glad and grateful for everything that happened to me so far, good and bad, because it's all shaped who I am today.

There are plenty of untold stories (like many Haskell jobs I never landed - IOHK one messed me up hard because I was close to working with effectfully), but one can only fit so much into a Telegram post.

Some people, especially novices, don't lurk the internet anymore. They just scroll. No culture, no curiosity, no unique interests. Just plain, boring people. Dare I say... another brick in the wall?

Wait, have I become lactose intolerant? No, no, no... this can't be...

Everything went well. They said that they appreciated my high performance and extended the contract with a salary increase on top of it.

"in my sewerslvt era again"

Worst summer of my life.

"Can you even measure the resistance with a multimeter?" says a person with ChatGPT on hand while trying to teach me to do the thing I've done for 3.5 years in the past.

Is there something wrong with people or else what is the cause of this kind of behavior?

Freiheit

It's been a year since I achieved career freedom. I was truly happy back then, and I'm even happier now.

To be more precise, this has meant working with a good salary, fully remote, AND with a flexible schedule. A magnificent combination. I'm so thankful for my friends who have cherished and supported me and my passions. I'm especially thankful for the Russian Haskell community and the other chats I'm in. I've had my fair share of people there to look up to and they, thankfully, still haven't disappointed. (It's a topic that has led me to some interesting conclusions. See: Vorbild)

I've had a significant boost within this period. I got my hands on type theory, proof assistants, formal specification languages, and more. I also successfully used Alloy 6 in production. Even if I only formalized a small part of our app, it was something. Then I got a Haskell job (more on this in the near future).

However, I've learned it's not a perfect situation. The downside of working fully remote with a flexible schedule is that your family might not take your job seriously. So, if you live with them, try to get to an office at least once or twice a week. Better yet: live alone, explore the world (digital nomad visas are great for this), and embrace solitude.

Looking forward to achieving even greater freedom.