Good developers tend to have a predictable amount of cognitive energy each day. When work absorbs it, it dissipates cleanly. When it doesn’t, it leaks into side projects and binge-learning — or gets burned off fighting friction.
I’ve changed jobs plenty of times, but I’ve almost never stopped. This is what it feels like to step into a real pause, and why that matters.
Merry Christmas from The Cynical Dev. As we head into the last working day of the year for many of us in New Zealand (at least in IT), today also happens to be my final day on my current contract. That feels like a reasonable moment to pause and look back. ...
Why constant learning can feel productive but quietly erode our ability to think.
Every ping wants a piece of you. Eventually, there’s nothing left to share. By the time I finished my fifth meeting of the day, I’d spent five and a half hours “collaborating” and exactly zero minutes doing what I was hired to do. I’m a developer, technically. But most days I feel more like an antenna picking up whatever signal Teams, or Jira or Outlook decides to emit. ...
Big companies love boxes. Policies, platforms, roadmaps. Fine. The trick is noticing the room inside the box. This is a map of what developers and teams can actually control in that room, what can be bent without a permission slip, and what can only be influenced over time. It’s not theory. It’s the small, repeatable moves that make your day less miserable and your system less fragile. The Three Buckets of Control I think about control in three rough categories. ...
Most of what we use online feels free. Search engines, maps, email, video. All the things we reach for without thinking. They’re not really free of course. They’re funded by advertising and by siphoning off our attention and our data. You already know the line: if you’re not paying, you’re the product. In a world of user pays - what would you pay for? But what if that model never existed. What if every service had a price tag. No ads, no data harvesting, no “free tier”. Would you pay for YouTube. Would you pay for it and Spotify and cloud storage and messaging apps. At some point you’d run out of money and you’d have to choose. ...
I’ve worked in places where the fire never stops, and in places where the fire went out years ago. Neither is healthy. One will burn you out. The other will quietly let you rust. These are two faces of the same problem: a culture that’s failing its people and its purpose. It’s not just the productivity of the company the suffers. It’s the toll on the people inside the company, and how those patterns get built in. ...
“Congrats, You’ve Made It” You made it. You’re a Senior Developer now. You’ve got the title, the responsibility, the trust. You’re the person they call when things go sideways and production is on fire, or a junior is stuck, or no ones reading the error logs. You don’t even need a manager anymore. You’re “self-managing,” which is shorthand for doing two people’s jobs while politely declining meetings. You’re experienced, stable, and invaluable. And this… is as far as it goes. There’s no ceremony. No next step. No map. Just a long, slow plateau. ...
Yes, This really happened. And yes, I was at Taco Bell — against my better judgment. When Life throws you a UX lesson. I just wanted a quick dinner. Instead, I got a masterclass in how to build a system so broken it loops back around to being educational. It all started when the self-checkout asked me to enter my own order number. What?? Next to the kiosk was a rack for those little buzzers that vibrate when your food is ready. Perfect I’ll just enter the number…except there were none. Just an empty holder, like a relic from a time when this system maybe tried to work. ...