Pulling back from comfort

It’s a Sunday night, and I had a chance to look back on everything.

Last week I spent a lot of time on company activities. Movie night, poker, badminton. They’re lovely, I wouldn’t deny that. But when I sit down and think about it, those evenings ate up all the space I had for learning. And I couldn’t grow.

I decided to leave the badminton club recently. Because it doesnt’t fit me. And now, I’m thinking about stopping everything else too. Poker, movie nights, all of it. Not because they’re bad. Because they’re comfortable. And comfort isn’t what I need right now.

The biggest thing I’ve been feeling lately is this hollow. At work, and around work. I contributed to Bridz. Shipped it. Felt proud for a moment. Then it’s just… an internal tool. A dead report. A single digit appear in the charts in a day or two. Nobody really cares. And I can’t expect more, because the product serves a few thousand users at best. There’s no scale to chase, no performance to optimize, no architecture to stress-test. The problems simply… don’t demand it.

I proposed a proper security model for protecting user keys. Got told to go with security by obscurity. Against basic principles. But that’s the environment. It doesn’t need “right.” It needs “practical” and “fast”.

Everything feels capped. Technical depth. AI usage. Salary. Growth. The environment has a ceiling, and I’ve been bumping into it.

The senior devs stayed much longer. They’re better at life than I am. They’re not bad engineers either. So maybe I’m wrong? Maybe I’m overrating myself. I’m not even at one year of experience yet.

In the end, I don’t think the hollow feeling comes from arrogance. It comes from caring more than the environment allows. I want the craft to count. I want the problems to push me. And when I reach for that and the answer is “that’s not what we do here,” it’s not a judgment on anyone or anything. It’s just… clarity.

I have one data point. One company, one environment. I genuinely don’t know how good I am or how far I can go. The only way to find out is to go try harder things and let the results tell me.

So the plan is simple. Pull back from the comfortable stuff. Train harder. Go deeper. Not to prove anything. Just to get more data points.

PS (March 10): Two days later, I took down the service for almost two hours. Turns out the problems were always there. I just hadn’t looked deep enough.