It has already been three months since I changed jobs. I have worked on a lot in that time and spent most of it moving at full speed.
Before the product relaunch, I sometimes worked on only about four hours of sleep a day. Taking responsibility for development on my own made the pressure and responsibility feel heavier, and I often wondered whether I was actually growing well.
Finding a way of working that fits me
I had to handle a lot of context at once. Because of my ADHD tendencies, I switch between thoughts and tasks quickly, but that also means the context I was just looking at can become blurry.
So I tried several things. I made a hook to force myself to pause instead of skipping over what I did not understand, and I gradually organized a way to continue work that fits me. It is not a finished method yet; I am still refining my own harness.
The domain that makes work fun
Another thing I realized this time is that the domain matters quite a lot to me. I am someone who gets immersed when work is fun, and what I am building plays a big role in that feeling.
I had mostly worked on the frontend before, but this time I worked full-stack and encountered much more of the server and infrastructure. The more I saw that I did not properly understand, the more I wanted to study.
What AI makes faster, and what I need to think about more
The more I use AI, the more I feel that the depth of my own knowledge and judgment matters. Which architecture to choose, which references to look at for UI and UX, and how far to think from the user’s point of view—all of these decisions seem to matter more as implementation gets faster.
I am still enjoying the work. The environment comes with a lot of responsibility, but I am building new features and getting to experience marketing, design, and even something close to a PM role alongside development. I can also try several things around AX.
So lately I have been thinking about what I can do better here and what strengths I can develop. I do not want to be satisfied only with having done a lot; I want to understand the work I do and become someone who makes better decisions.