05 Jul 2026 #coding #career
You know something is happening when Hacker News features a Who Is Quitting instead of a Who Is Hiring.
Bad managers, unrealistic expectations, AI, toxic culture…
Every response shared a different but similar story.
I’ve wanted to quit more times than I can count.
After a layoff in 2024, I stopped coding for almost a year.
That breaking moment came after a “good job” that broke me, left me sick, and burned me out.
The time between jobs became a mini-sabbatical.
I couldn’t find a job and nearly drained my savings.
But that was the most peaceful moment in my recent years.
After recovering, I took a coding gig as a freelancer while reinventing myself.
Since then, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with coding.
And just yesterday, a stupid error made me think about quitting again.
As some sort of manifestation, I don’t see myself coding until retirement.
Instead of coding, I’m working on my horizon goal:
Turning parts of my life into books.
Before I retire, I’m passing on what I learned in a book series. The second book, Street-Smart Coding, is already out. The prequel is on its way. It’s my way of sharing the lessons nobody told me.
04 Jul 2026 #coding
Yesterday, it happened again.
I had an error message that made me scratch my head.
For a moment, I thought, “God, why am I doing this? I should start a garden or something.”
I copy-pasted the error message into Google.
StackOverflow didn’t help that much.
I was tempted to go to Copilot.
But I held my horses.
A few moments later, “Oooohh, here it is!”
A one-line code change fixed it.
Stupid Entity Framework Core!
I was in a rush a few days before and I missed a small detail:
I used a collection to map a one-to-one relationship.
Simple! I know. Only integration tests caught it.
For a moment, an error message made me want to quit.
A second later, I was back in the game.
Yet again. For the nth time.
I guess AI doesn’t give you that feeling—or does it?
Whether you code the old way or with AI, check out Street-Smart Coding—It covers debugging, testing, and many 28 more lessons to help you code like a pro.
03 Jul 2026 #mondaylinks
Hey there.
Before this week’s links, a quick update:
After a couple of rounds of editing, I recruited a couple of friends as beta readers for Street-Smart Coding Manifesto. It’s not the first time someone’s read these ideas, but I like honest feedback before launching—to quiet the inner critic.
As usual, here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
#1. Keeping a blog showed me a corner of the web outside the big platforms. But I didn’t know about the smolweb and its protocols (5min), like gopher and finger.
#2. We’re not coders anymore, but couriers (3min). Now our real job is delivery.
#3. I used to argue passionately about languages, principles, and best practices. But over time, just like this coder, I stopped arguing with people (8min).
#4. Here’s an open letter (2min) from a teacher to his students, reflecting on how to navigate the current tech landscape.
And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about syntax not being the edge anymore (2min) and about AI making you fast, but forgettable (2min).
(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Street-Smart Coding Manifesto. My case against syntax obsession to stand out. Because real impact comes from skills outside your IDE.
Preorder for just $1 and become a coder who stands out beyond syntax. If you’d like to support the work, contribute $5 or more, and I’ll thank you in the Acknowledgments.
See you next time,
Cesar
02 Jul 2026 #writing #bookwriting
Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham using only 50 words.
Amazon limits team size to what two pizzas can feed.
Virgil Abloh challenged himself to tweak only 3% of an existing design.
Inspired by these examples and by this David Epstein’s YouTube video, here’s my 10-idea list of writing constraints—pair them with these fun blog post challenges:
- Write a book first draft in one month
- Share only 10 main ideas, one idea per chapter, in a book
- Spend no more than one hour writing and editing a post
- Write a book backwards: start with a cover, sales page, and one-liner
- Reuse the same material more than once
- Finish a book in half the time it took your last one
- Write a book only using your notes
- Challenge yourself with an impossible deadline, like a book in a weekend
- Finish your daily writing before lunch
- Limit your book to under 50 or 100 pages, or maybe just one page
Constraints make you more creative—and more productive. Without them, you’ll keep tweaking and perfecting forever.
01 Jul 2026 #wellness #selfgrowth
From Derek Sivers’ Useful But Not True, you can always choose your next thought or reaction.
But yesterday, I failed to choose my next reaction after a frustrating purchase over the phone.
Then I hit a roadblock with a coding task.
I felt how my energy was depleted.
To change my mood, I switched to writing, something I enjoy.
Hoping to find something to steal, I opened my RSS reader and checked my favorite blog aggregators.
But scrolling only made things worse.
It ended up draining the remaining energy.
Screens don’t energize me.
Until it was time for my daily walk.
Fresh air, the outdoors, and oxygenated blood always lift a bad mood, just like finding a health package in a video game.
A walk can fix almost anything, by giving you fresh eyes to approach it.