Now

Work

I quit my job in August. It may have seemed out of the blue to some people, but I've been planning to quit for quite some time. I felt there wasn't much opportunity to grow left and other than occasional interesting technical problem, the work wasn't fulfilling to me. Initially I didn't plan on leaving until I found something else, but there was an opportunity to take a voluntary exit during a company reorg and leave with severance, so I took it.

After leaving, I took a month-long break to recharge and rethink my priorities and strategy going forward. While I still have entrepreneurial ambitions, I don't think it's the right time to pursue them full time, so I decided to start looking for a new job.

Job Search

This is the first time in my five-year long career that I'm going on a job search. All of my previous jobs and side gigs have been from referrals. Up until this point I conducted more interviews as an interviewer than an interviewee.

I did some interviews with companies that reached out to me after finding out I left my job, as well as some warmup interviews, and I've been happy with the results. I've gotten much better at handling the stress from the interviews, which was the main reason I've been avoiding doing them for so long.

Since I'm not in a rush to get a job, I'm focusing on companies and positions that seem ideal for me. Unfortunately a large portion of companies don't hire outside the US, even for remote positions, which constricts the pool of available options. Going into this process I expected to land more interviews, but it appears that I'm not as strong of a candidate on paper. I mostly moved away from cold applications on company websites towards a more personalized approach.

I have mixed feelings about all of this so far. The market isn't great, as everyone is telling, and the process is broken in most places I've interviewed with, but I don't think the situation is that bad and there is some method to the madness. I learned a lot during this time and I'll probably do a longer write-up about my experience once I'm done.

Side Projects

I finally started working on the side project that's been brewing in my had for quite some time. I'm still not going to publicly reveal what it is, but I hope to ship the first version soon. I have an initial design draft and I made a decent progress on parser for the schema language it's going to be based on. I'm using Go, and so far I'm happy with my rate of progress and the quality of code I'm producing.

I'm still playing with and keeping track on AI. While there are some good use cases, I still think it's more of a distraction than something to build a product on or build into a product. I think there's a huge amount of alpha in going the opposite direction, and building something in more established spaces while everyone's distracted with shoehorning an LLM into their product.

Gym

For the first time in almost a decade, I've been hitting the gym consistently, and it started showing. I'm the strongest I've ever been, and if we ignore some belly fat, I look pretty good. I'm still not hitting all 5.5 workouts per week, but I do at least 4. When it comes to cardio I'm still in poor shape, but I'm planning to change that.

Traveling

I visited Bucharest near the end of September. It wasn't what I expected, but overall I was pleasantly surprised. In a couple of days I'm going to visit Trieste with a big group of friends. It's going to be a short trip, but I expect a lot of fun. As always, I'm looking for my next destination. However, it's likely that I'm going to have to put any ideas I have on hold until I finish my job search and settle into a new position.

Entertainment

I haven't been playing video games since April, and even though most of that time still isn't going towards something useful, I'm spending less time behind a desk so I take it as a win.

I've been into murder mysteries lately. I watched Moonflower Murders, and it was good, but not as good as its predecessor. Currently I'm watching the fourth season of Only Murders in the Building, and I've been loving it so far. In my opinion it's on par with the first season. I liked the first season of Orphan Black but didn't continue, probably because I've already read some spoilers and there are quite a few episodes left.