Original post is somewhere in my history, short version: 10 years as lead technician at a big Swedish IT company, walked out last November with six months of paid leave and no plan. Spent the leave building things. One interview by January.
The update nobody asked for: the paid leave ended in May. Unemployment benefits kicked in the same week. My five-year relationship ended the same month. I moved out of the farm we shared the same month too. Life cleared its entire backlog in one sprint.
Also sold the horses. Two of them were mine - a Swedish Ardennes and a Gotland pony who have been inseparable since foals. Half the buyers only wanted the Ardennes and treated the pony as a rounding error. Found a family four hours north who took both. I helped load them onto the truck and then stood in the driveway crying like a man who has read too much into a pony, which I have.
I moved back to the town I grew up in. Same neighborhood. The meadow I played on as a kid is a road with houses on it now. My memories are double-exposed everywhere I walk.
Career status: interviews are actually going okay. Costing role in manufacturing (owning the margins), an SCCM gig, product owner at one of Sweden's oldest vehicle software companies. Developer positions applied for in six months: zero. The barrier is not skill. The barrier is that typing my own job title into a form feels like asking permission to exist.
Side project status: my horse management SaaS runs along quietly, +/- 20 users a month, revenue exactly zero, everything reinvested into hosting because I optimized myself into a corner on free tiers early on. A competitor launched after me, cloned most of it, and made an "X vs Horsemate" comparison page. Intellectually I understand the SEO play. Emotionally I am standing on a pointless hill with a little flag.
One good thing: my January post ended with "my DMs are open", written as a formality. Someone actually used it. We talked about imposter syndrome for hours, solved nothing, and it still helped. He showed me his unreleased project and I got to tell him it counts. Cheapest therapy there is.
Full writeup on my blog: [link]
"Every purchase now gets reviewed by a committee I never elected, and the committee rarely approves anything."
I felt that sentence in my wallet. The committee meets every time I open my banking app and its only agenda item is shame.
Attendance is mandatory, minutes are taken, motions are denied. It's the most functional organization I've ever been part of and I hate it.
American here. Quit job → health insurance gone at midnight → COBRA costs more than my mortgage → one broken arm from bankruptcy speedrun. Meanwhile the Swedish state just... sends you money and politely asks that you keep applying for jobs.
I'm not saying I'm packing bags. I'm saying I looked up flights.
We pay very high taxes for exactly this and honestly? Worth it. The a-kassa letter literally wished him a nice summer. Imagine your unemployment agency having summer vibes.
Anyone who rejects a pony because "we only want the big useful one" does not deserve horses. Ponies are the senior engineers of the equine world: small, extremely opinionated, secretly carrying the whole team while everyone praises the big guy.
Niter thanks you. He cannot read this. Even if he could, he would ignore you. It's what makes him Niter.
Zero dev applications in six months while running a SaaS with real users, shipping open source Rust apps, and writing a technical blog is the most developer-brained thing I've ever read. Sir, the voice is not a hiring manager. Stop letting it screen you out of your own applications.
This is either the most validating or the most depressing thing anyone has said to me this year. Currently leaning both.
The meadow-that-is-now-a-road detail wrecked me a little. The town didn't betray you, it just kept living while you were away. Every small town does this. Weirdly, I find that comforting - the world goes on whether you're watching or not, which means it'll go on when you're scared too.
"Comforting" is a strong word. I'd currently rate it "survivable." The road did get a bike lane though, and eight-year-old me would have been all over that, so maybe we're even.
Comparison pages are scummy but they only work BECAUSE your product ranks for the category terms. He's paying you the compliment of competing on your brand name. And every visitor to his "X vs Horsemate" page learns that Horsemate exists and shipped first. Congratulations, it's free marketing.
Intellectually I know all of this. Emotionally I am standing on my pointless hill holding my little flag and I will not be taking questions.
Based hill. Hold the flag.
That DM story got me. I released my first side project last month after two years of not daring to. Nobody uses it. But the idea that support can just be handed out between strangers, no solution required, made me feel weirdly okay about v0.1 being embarrassing.
v0.1 being embarrassing is the entry fee, not the verdict. Ship v0.2 anyway. And for what it's worth from a stranger on the internet: releasing at all puts you ahead of the version of me that debated an open source release for weeks.
Not to be that guy but you had six months of paid leave, sold assets, and now collect government benefits while blogging. Some of us call that a sabbatical with extra steps.
Sir this is a Wendy's