Reflect

This is a small excerpt from an email exchange between myself and a former colleague, after I had just quit my backend role at a financial exchange and I was trying to decide what to do for work.

> Why a database?
How to unpack this lol, a few themes:
1. I want answers to - "do I want to work on databases professionally"? and "can I gain the technical competence to be effective"?
2. It's a fundamental area of computer science and deep knowledge here accumulates regardless of 1.
3. It takes a really long time and large amounts of focus/skill to make progress (it's a hard thing)
4. It could lead to working on important things (related to 1 but different)

> I'm very curious. How do you study? You seem so much more competent in programming compared to when we worked together a few years ago.
It's been about three years! That's a long time! lol by default almost everyone improves by sheer inertia/requirements of working in the industry!

I honestly still suck at some things and have lots of areas to improve on. _Seeming competent_ is very different from _being competent_.
The mental models of operating and creating good software is different from selling that (and sell, you must!), there's overlap but they're different things.
There's lots I continue to struggle with and the mountains of unfinished work & rejections I have had (and in all likelihood continue to) is obviously a testament to that fact.

It's also contextual right? Building and owning an application product, iterating over user feedback and scaling that to an increasingly successful market is a 
very very different skill set from messing around with virtual networks, bypassing/interacting with the kernel and fiddling with ptrace. There are different kinds of valuable work.

I wouldn't say there's anything specific to it -- In fact I don't study as much as I should or could.
A better way to put it is I have no idea what I'm doing. Just trying my best.
I can point you right now to lots of folks that are much more productive than I am writing software.

Your plan sounds really good -- looking forward to the launch!
If I had any advice, it'd be to listen to hamming -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

As I write this nearly two years later, I’m right back there? 2024 was an extremely difficult year for me. My long term relationship with my girlfriend eroded and the stress of being unemployed strained on it and I made some awful dumb mistakes, it eventually ended in the most disastrous way much later. My life/career was spinning out of control and… I tried to learn and work on things, I tried to produce work, do what one can do to navigate a difficult job market - and thanks to the kindness of people I met on the internet I found something, I got a chance to work on a storage engine/database for a new blockchain in some capacity not a toy or side project, a God’s honest real one!

Yet, I think it kind of destroyed me, if I’m being honest. 2025 was no better.

I was looking for an environment to grow my career I was tired of contracting, I wanted a place I could learn and grow doing systems programming + databases on something useful - I was looking for a fulltime role, I got offered a short-term contract subject to performance evaluation. Reality is defined by constraints.

I was thrown into the deep end of fundamentally difficult problems, it turned out to be something like an intersection between swe and research, vaguely defined problems, unknown ways to approach them, spelunking papers daily – yet none of it, nothing I did seemed to - matter? I couldn’t make progress fast enough or meaningfully enough.

It was never clear to me what I needed to do to make progress and I wasn’t sure how to navigate the environment remotely given it was a very in person office culture. My proficiency with c++ was embarassingly so bad I don’t even know, I’ve often found myself productive with a new language in 2months, not c++, not me, the problems were so intricate nothing could save me.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt a lack of control like this about solving problems. Every time I asked a question about things that didn’t make sense, I felt stupider and less valuable. The stress of being unable to produce progress eventually turned into not sleeping, programming God knows what at extremely odd hours, obssessively reading and re-reading code I couldn’t understand, past mental exhaustion, to the point that “working harder” was actively harmful and eventually apathy.

I was genuinely relieved when I was let go. I didn’t want to live like that anymore. Yet I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do, so I did — nothing. I thought maybe I’m just tired, so I took two weeks. no programming I said! go outiside and touch grass!

After that I tried to program and I just – could not. Literally. I couldn’t find a way to will myself to sit there and do anything, not leetcode. not a side project. nothing. Nothing. I felt exhaustion and sadness looking at code that just didn’t go away no matter what. I’ll skip to the genuinely fun highlights of what follows, it was one of the darkest depressions of my life - not the darkest, that happened in school, but this was very close.

I watched alot of tv that was fun, in a dark room, not knowing wheter it was day or morning. I saw alot of anime, all eight seasons of house, the mentalist, The O.C. and friends multiple times that’s all that was good about the past six months. I gained weight, but I kept on applying, sort of. I needed to make money somehow, but even if I had gotten an interview I would not have passed.

Eventually though, as in all things, January is a season of renewal? I’m grinding leetcode. It feels fun and kind of okay. I’m reading about computer architecture, maybe I’ll write and build stuff again. The leetcode feels a little stupid and pointlessly like trivia and fake work, that’s not really productive and more like a fake procrastination, but that’s okay. I can’t handle open ended work. I like the closed loop. and of course applying, I don’t know what happens now, but it cannot be good given I’ve wasted nearly six or so months unproductively dealing with a depression/burnout that has not gone away. This wasn’t originally intended to be be published, but at this point I might as well own it, if anyone asks, as people have on occasion I can be lazy and point at something rather than saying something vague and optimistic or having to rehash the same boring story. It happened. It sucked. I’m trying to move on.

Uhm also let it be said the people I worked with were awesome. I really admire them. My failings are entirely my own and everyone operates under constraints and is held accoutable to reality. It’s just one of those things that happens, you think it’s going to be a great fit, it sounds like you’ve found an environment and people that seem like you and they seem to want to want to work with you too, but no - it is what it is.

People who write software are people? and sometimes life happens to those people and it just sucks. sorry. there’s nothing good or useful or valuable about this reflection it just sucks.