A follow-up to What to do in tech after 20 years?*

Two years ago, I was between a rock and a hard place, thinking about what I should do with my career and my life. Screw with 20 years of my life and do something completely new? Continue working hard to ensure my bosses get a new yacht?

Then Google Now recommended a post on DEVto. Some nice ideas there, and the community was engaging. And then I wrote my first post here. I won't lie, it was a rant. I was lost, kind of tired, and wanted to know if anyone else out there had figured out what to do with themselves after 20+ years of IT work when the passion that brought them in was, for all practical purposes, gone.

26 comments came in. A lot of them were generous. A few were wise. One of them (mine, to be fair) ended with "my now public mid-life crisis :)".

I don't know exactly why, but I remembered that post last week and noticed that two years have passed. In internet terms, basically two centuries. It's weird reading that back. I don't disagree with past-me, but I barely recognize him either.

So here's what I've figured out in between.

The creativity wasn't gone, it was burnt out

Back in the old days, before my burnout process, coworkers used to say I was the "ideas guy". I had too many, actually. Some were good. Most were weird. A lot involved weird references to 80's movies and series. A few turned into things that actually got built.

After the burnout, that part of my brain just… switched off. Not in a dramatic way. Just... silence. I could still code. I could still ship. I could still lead projects. But the part that came up with the weird ideas stopped answering when I called. "Why should I care?" — "It doesn't matter" — "They don't respect my ideas" — my mind was filled with noise, and not the good type of noise.

What I didn't realize at the time was that burnout had stacked on top of something else I didn't yet have a name for: a brain that had been running on pure masking fuel for 35+ years. The creativity hadn't left. I had just run out of spoons to reach for it.

Getting a neurodivergence diagnosis in your 40s rewrites your whole professional and personal life in retrospect. Every "why can't I just…" and every "why am I the only one who sees this?" and every burnout cycle I thought was about the job. A lot of it turned out to be about how my brain works.

And if you read until this part, that's not a sad realization. It's actually the opposite.

Proof the lights came back on

A month after that first rant, DEV.to ran the Coze AI Bot Challenge. I was mid-diagnosis, reading a lot, talking to my therapist, trying to make sense of a life I'd been living on hard mode without knowing. And during this process, I built Auty. A friendly bot meant to help people on the spectrum: not as a professional, just as a cool friend. The name came naturally: gender-neutral, catchy, related to autism, and fulfilling my life's need to name every AI project with a pun. AutI.

And my idea won in the creativity category.

Considering where I was, no surprise to say that I was not expecting this prize.

Then, this March, I entered the Built with Google Gemini: Writing Challenge with a post about using the Gemini CLI to resurrect pet projects that had been sitting on a server, slowly dying, while I was busy being an adult. Two old MVPs that worked, won their little battles, and then aged in place because I didn't have the energy or time to revisit them.

That won too.

Somewhere in between, without me really noticing, this profile picked up 18,000+ followers. From 19 posts. I still don't fully understand how the math is "mathing" here. I'm not the guy who posts every week, I'm the guy who shows up when he feels that something needs to be said, even when it might not reach those who need to hear it. But knowing that many people felt I was worth a notification of a new post published is… good. I'm genuinely glad to be seen.

Two prizes and 18k people paying attention. For someone who wrote a rant about feeling creatively and emotionally dead, that's the universe being a little on the nose.

AI didn't bring it back. But it's part of what's keeping it going.

Here's where I'm going to contradict my old post a bit. Back then, I looked at AI and went meh. Considering the results I was getting, I thought it was just hype. The new NFTs (well, deep down I still think most of the AI talk is just smoke and mirrors, but that's not the point).

Two years of building with it later, I'm still not a believer in the religion. I've written at length on LinkedIn and Medium about AI slop, about AI regulations, about AI psychosis, and how AI is changing how people perceive reality. Every time someone tells me ChatGPT is their therapist or even their best friend, I want to scream.

But AI as a tool? Totally different story.

The reason it matters here is simple: when the creativity started flickering back on, I suddenly didn't need to 100% plan, execute, test, and market my personal projects alone. I've got a small team of junior devs (be it Claude, Gemini, Codex, or even a small local model on my home server) that I run like a very patient senior would.

Sometimes they're rubber ducks, and I work through a problem just by explaining it out loud to them. Sometimes they're planners, drafting execution files I can work through a step at a time on nights when my brain is tired but not done. Sometimes they actually write code, and I review it like I'd review any other junior's PR: carefully, with the assumption that something in there is wrong. Each one has a different personality, a different set of bad habits, and a different style of being overconfident. Managing and understanding them is more like managing people than I expected.

And every single one of them runs with a human in the loop — that's me, signing the final result. My rule for every automation I build for clients is the same rule I have for my own projects: when it screws up (and it will), some person made of flesh and blood has to be the one explaining it to another person made of flesh and blood.

I don't feel replaced. I feel like I got a new tool.

The creativity doesn't only go into code anymore

Before the burnout, I'd started learning how to cook. Not the "here's my instant ramen, I put some crumbles on top" kind, but actual dishes I wanted to experiment with. I lost that love during the burnout period, and the recovery process quietly rekindled it. If I can understand patterns as few people can, maybe I can also mix spices for a new sauce.

Now it's a thing. I've got my knives, my stocks, my opinions about which pepper to use and when. I've ruined enough plates to know what I'm doing. It scratches a part of my brain that writing and coding barely touch, and in a good way. I'm still creating things and hoping someone appreciates them. And I know I'm doing it right in the same way I know everything else is working: when my wife says she'd rather I cook than we eat out.

There's also a home server humming away in the corner of my office. Nothing fancy: it started as a Raspberry Pi trying its best, and now it's 20TB+ of data sitting in a cool case. What started as a "why am I paying for things I could host myself" project slowly became where I keep the parts of my digital life I don't want a big tech landlord evicting me from someday. Having a machine in my house that does exactly what I tell it to, nothing more, is still one of the quiet pleasures of this job.

And I still write. Here, on Medium, on LinkedIn, on my own site. But I do it differently now. Not because I need to pay my bills (well, I still need to pay my bills, sadly), but because I love what I'm doing, the way I'm doing it. Writing about the imposter syndrome of meeting clients in English and seeing how people resonate with that feeling gives me a reason to keep going — even if sometimes "keep going" means writing 20+ pages of documentation for a project I know the client won't read and then ask me about it.

That's what I couldn't see two years ago.

So, to answer the question in the title

Two years ago, I asked thousands of people what to do in tech after 20 years. I didn't get one answer: I got dozens. I met lots of new people. Somehow, DEVto embraced me. In an internet full of hate and hot takes, this place turned out to be a community where I could talk with people, get new ideas, and be challenged in good ways.

Things are a lot better now. And DEVto has a part in it.

Turns out the question was wrong. "What now?" assumes there's a single next thing, a new direction, a pivot. Reality is a lot messier. I mean, even DEVto has changed a lot since then.

There was no grand plan. No career reinvention arc. No big refactor or a new layout that would change how people perceive me. Just slightly less masking, slightly more writing, and a lot more asking what I'm doing that actually gives me pleasure.

The passion didn't come back the way it used to be. And that's OK, I'm not young anymore. "What a shame to be 45 years old and not completely covered in scars." Go watch Shrinking.

Something else took the place of that passion. I'm still figuring out what to call this version of it.

What's yours doing?