40

Life is a long lesson in humility.

– James M. Barrie

Long time, no write. It’s been quite a while since my last article here. Such dry spells always make a bit sad, as I love writing and I have a huge backlog of ideas that I want to expand upon. So, why did this happen?

As you can imagine - there are always multiple reasons. I do think that the main reason for my diminished presence here is that I turned 40 earlier this month.¹ As it usually happens with me around milestones in my life, I’ve been in a very self-reflective mood during much of the year. I’ve been wondering a lot about the life decisions I’ve made to date, and what’s next for me. I didn’t really come up with any revelations, but I did a lot of thinking regardless.

It’s funny how quickly life passes. I feel like I was 20 just a couple of years ago. In a way it seems to me that life moves faster and faster the older you get. I’d like to believe that I’m still young at heart, but I might just be fooling myself.

I highly doubt anyone wants to read anything about my personal struggles, goals, regrets, etc, so I’ll just write a bit about some “professional” milestones that might be more of general interest:

• 20 years in programming, even more if we count the time in high-school, where officially I studied CS, but for me computers were mostly fun. (I was an avid gamer back in the day) That’s half my life at this point. 20 years later I love programming a lot more than in the beginning, so it seems to me I chose the right career (hobby as well).
• Almost 20 years of passion for Free and Open-Source software. 15+ years of being very actively engaged in the FOSS community. I’ve learned so much from the amazing people in the Emacs, Java, Ruby, Clojure, etc communities and I feel very fortunate to be able to contribute something back.
• 19 years have passed since my first attempt to be an educator. I used to do a lot of teaching, but this now feels like something that happened in a different life.
• 13 years working in various managerial roles. 12 of them spent in the so-called “Senior Leadership”. I love to think of myself as a programmer first, but this might be just wishful thinking at this point. I never thought that I would become a leader in any shape or form. I’m still surprised that I did!
• Almost 10 years in the same job - essentially my entire 30s. A quarter of my life! That was one wild ride, that I would have never envisioned when it started.
• Almost 20 of years preaching the gospel of the One True Editor! I’m still a true believer!
• So many articles, talks and FOSS projects! Looking back I’m not sure how I found both the time and the energy for everything I’ve done. The “era” between 27 and 35 was particularly wild. I will always cherish those years and remember them fondly!
• I still didn’t manage to finish “The Wheel of Time”, but I’m closer than ever to the end! Perhaps I’ll finally achieve that epic milestone before the end of the year!

If I have to narrow to the past decade:

• I learned a lot about scaling projects, teams and businesses. Funny enough - many of the lessons I learned on the FOSS front I managed to apply in my managerial job and vice versa. Turns out that being the head maintainer of big OSS projects is not very different from being an engineering manager.
• I learned a lot about humility. In my 20s, like many very young people, I was quite arrogant and often felt all-knowing and self-confident. I thought I knew better than most people and I can make no mistakes. In my 30s I made a lot of mistakes and I think I learned quite a few valuable lessons from them about both life in general, and programming/management in particular.
• I learned to value the boring side of life. I miss the world before the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. I miss the world before the times of ultra-deep divisions in societies. Sadly, I didn’t realize how precious our life back in those peaceful times was, because I took it as a given.
• I developed a deep distaste for modern social media. I rediscovered the joy of using e-mail, RSS and communicating bigger ideas via old-school blog articles.
• I’ve started to enjoy more non-fiction books compared to fiction. And I’m not talking about books about programming!
• I can barely tolerate any Marvel movies, and I used to be a huge fan!
• I made the mistake to start re-reading “The Wheel of Time”.
• I traveled all over the world and realized my life-long dream to visit places like New York, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, etc. Travel brought me a lot of joy over the last decade. Exploring the world, experiencing new cultures and meeting people from all over the world certainly changed me.
• I worked remotely 9.8 out of the past 10 years, which helped a lot with the previous item. This was another very novel experience for me and it had a lasting impact on me.

After all this time I’m still very passionate about programming, building great products and great teams, and I highly doubt that’s going to change any time soon. But I’ve developed other passions along the way as well, which compete mostly with the limited time (and energy) that I have for my FOSS work. Sometimes I wonder if I have too many hobbies, as I’m often struggling to dedicate them as much time as I’d like! Oh, well - I guess that’s not a horrible problem to have.

While I do have some regrets about some things I’ve done and I didn’t do, looking back I’m quite happy with how my life (and career) turned out. Thanks to everyone who was a part of it, supported me in some shape or form, and made the adventure as fun as it was! A physician recently told me the period between 30 and 40 is the best in life and it all goes downhill from there, but I still hope that the best is yet to come.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

31st of October is the next best thing.

1. I should have probably written this article on the 13th of October, but I thought that ↩