The end of the year is always a wonderful time because this is when I get to spend most of my time away from work and that means more time for thinking and making realizations about what I should and should not be doing in my everyday life.

Again, 1.5 years have passed since I wrote my last post about my plans for learning new stuff that I thought would help me steer my professional life into a better direction. Guess what, I didn’t make any progress on that front and that feels… discouraging.

On the other hand, I don’t really feel guilty because many other things happened and I was far from idle during this period. In August 2020 my son was born. What an amazing little kid… That same month I also left Evosoft for Morgan Stanley. Evosoft was an amazingly friendly place and I was part of an especially nice and friendly team but our project was falling apart and we had to make a move. I accepted the job at MS mostly because the pay was great and also thought that it would look badass on my CV. Unfortunately the work and the environment was beyond terrible so I left after just 4 months to follow one of my Evosoft friends, @karandit to DMG-MORI (a company I never even heard about at the time) to do infrastructure automation stuff. This was a great decision: even better pay, a low-stress environment with lots of shiny tech to show off on my CV, a cool mentor/teammate and a nice team of reasonable, grown-up people.

On the side, I also kept working on our custom PACS solution which started to earn me some nice extra money. I was also slowly progressing at the university to finally earn my Bsc in software. This last semester I completed all the subjects, finished my thesis and I’m currently studying for my finals at the end of January.

We are also buying our first home. Lots of things in the past few months. And now, here I am, sitting at the desk writing this post thinking about how in 2 days, I’ll be back in the saddle. I really can’t complain about my current job… we are paid very well, we use interesting tech, I’m in a decent team with quite little stress and lots of flexibility… but still I feel like I’m spending 8 hours a day doing stuff I don’t care about. I really want to change that.

First, I need to finish my studies this month. Then the new home project will surely take a few months of free time away (but it will be exciting!) But then… I want to initiate some change in my professional life. In 2 ways: what I do and when I do it. I want to be working on something I care about. I keep a list of those things in a safe place, maybe I’ll share them in an upcoming post. As for the “when”, I mean when during the day and also how much each day. I’d really like to be working less overall and also less at times when I could be doing other, more important things like spending time with my son or going outdoors or exercising or even just sitting down and thinking about things I find important.

This year, I want to explore “project based work” - work with completely flexible working hours, possibly short term jobs where I work on something for a few months, finish it and then be done with it. I’d like to see what options I have with my current skillset and what skill I need to work on to improve my chances.

All in all, I have to say that I’m quite satisfied with how my life is going. I’m getting things done, I really got the best of this whole COVID-19 situation (full HO), my family is healty, I have an amazing little kid. Here is a reminder for myself: Everything is going just fine. Keep at it.