Looking back at 2 years
Tags: career
Published: 2023-05-21 18:58:01

I've been meaning to write down my thoughts for a couple weeks now. Maybe even more.

The thing is, I am about to start a new chapter in my life. Fortunately this seems to be something that will help me grow professionally and to me that is an aspect I care a lot about.

In November of 2020 I was on my 6th year at a "nearshore" consultancy company who had ben treating me really well and more specifically working  for a client company that I really enjoyed. By this time I was contacted by a foreign company because of the content I was putting out there about Meteor + Vue. I really enjoyed working with those two technologies and sharing my experience in a [_step by step how to video series_ ](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmJs3lfUmCdS8W27OoWj3uGDP6g4ypNyw)seemed logical to me. 

I posted a video series with that in mind and received an email inviting me to work on a "product company", more specifically a startup. This was going to be my first experience without having a team of dedicated profiles for each task (UX, QA, Product, Backend... etc) and it seemed like a good challenge to take on.

I had heard from just being in the industry long enough that the case with startups was more of a  "wear many hats" and "be prepared to have a ton of work all the time". To which I felt ready and also willing to go into. Sadly I must admit that it was really hard to keep up the pace at times. 

During my time there the pandemic was still going strong and the world overall felt like this chaotic, unstable, uncertain place. Some stuff happened at home starting with the fact that my wife had just recovered from Covid-19 before I started the new job and then including events like the house being robbed TWICE,  our dog that was 13yo passed away and some security incidents in the neighborhood. The kids and myself being sick from Covid-19 also happened during this time and I wasn't precisely in the headspace to be productive and contribute my very best to  the job. This is something that I will forever and ever be grateful with the people in charge, who gave me my time and space to recover, to try and get some rest and they were providing an understanding and safe environment when all of these things happened.

I could not be more grateful for that and for what it now feels like a glimpse, I could actually do my best. I was pumping out new features and cleaning up the UI like as well as improving the user interactions, I was making the app look cohesive and more professional. I was "doing what I know best". Although this felt like a very short period like I mentioned.

The time before that I had a bit of a harder time concentrating, making things work and learning or coming up with solutions wasn't as fluid as in the past (previous jobs). This became sort of a vicious cycle in a way because I was keeping myself from doing better, and the results weren't what I wanted to have as my output at all. It was frustrating and then I couldn't focus and do a better job because I had this constant feeling of not doing well enough. 

When things started to look better on my end, it was probably a little late. I didn't contribute to other aspects of the company like reaching out to people to tell them about our products. Or make some kind of content to showcase all of our hard work. Looking back I think this could have helped a little bit. But as I mentioned, my headspace was not really there (lame excuse, perhaps). Time was not enough for me to do anything but my main tasks and to be honest energy wasn't enough either.

I fortunately had some colleagues that were awesome at their job, and did very inspiring work to not only learn on the go, but also came up with great solutions to problems and to improve the main offering of the company all the time.  It really became a really nicely built product and it was just great to be able to work with them to bring it to life.

It was a really tough two years for my family and myself. I will not lie. Most of the time it felt like we were just fighting one obstacle after another and along all that I never really felt like I was doing "a good job". BUT. Looking back I can now see "we survived" and life continued, we did have the moral support from the extended family and were never left alone really. I already mentioned that the company was very supportive and this definitely helped us come through all of it.

I think I needed to give closure to this and write it down to do so, because I am ready for a new beginning. I want to "go back" to being good at my job and feeling like I can tackle technical challenges as well as provide and care for my family in a more balanced way. I am ready to be better prepared for financial emergencies and to plan (and act) for the future. 

I will certainly make mistakes, but I am also ready to learn from them. The path ahead can be scary at times and having a family brings so many variables into one's life that makes it even harder to not feel like "something will go wrong" one way or another, but learning how to deal with these things is also something I want to be able to say "I did it".