Cheers to the future!
What a crazy year this one has been, huh? I know it is probably the worst year for so many people, but for me, it really wasn’t that bad.
I grew up with a mentality that my purpose was to make people proud of me, that if I did what I was told people would like me and I’d be happy. Well, that led me to a college I didn’t want to do, to be surrounded by people I didn’t really like, super boring hobbies. Dealing with depression since 2009 and taking those f** anti-depressive pills(from 2016 until 2018) wasn’t helping either, I was always super scared of being alone.
I’ve been doing therapy for 4 years now but last year was the first time that besides doing therapy, I was also stuck at home(thanks COVID). I started living alone at the beginning of the pandemic, couldn’t see my friends, couldn’t do anything besides work on myself.
Oh boy, that was EXACTLY what I needed! An entire year of self-reflection helped me accomplish several things. Here are some highlights that me, myself and I are super proud of:
Learn to notice burnout
Some years ago I was working on a big local tech company, around 2.5k~3k employees, there is no one in my city that doesn’t know this company. Joined as an intern and build my way up to a full-time sysadmin throughout the almost 3 years I’ve worked there.
If only considering hard skills, it was probably the place I learned the most! Now if we consider the soft skills, well, quite the opposite. It was the classic company where sysadmins and developers hated each other, and since it was the first professional experience I had that I truly evolved, I evolved with this kind of mentality as well.
Production was always broken, blaming culture could be found there at its finest. Needless to say that such an environment led me to burnout, but it was super hard for me to realize… I suddenly quit, started on another company just to quit again in 3 months, 5 months in the next one(2 of those 5 was already during the pandemic) and this overwhelming feeling just didn’t go anywhere.
I started bringing this subject to my therapist, this feeling that I’m having a poor performance everywhere I worked, that every day I was counting the minutes to end my shift, that I was always tired, that I was even considering starting a new career on something totally not tech-related. After months of talking only about burnout on my sessions, I believe I can finally identify on my own emotional and physical signs that I’m experiencing burnout and it has already proved to be a super important ability for my career and well-being!
Started contributing to open-source
As a result of my early reflections during the pandemic, I did quit my job and took some time to think about what I wanted for my future.
Open-source always had my attention… I was always fascinated by how people interact at Github on those big open source projects. I like the idea of being part of communities, how people from different places of the world would join forces to make something useful together. Looking at it now I definitely romanticized it way too much, but, oh well, it shaped my way.
In May 2020 I was accepted on Linux Foundation’s Community Bridge program, a mentorship where I learned how it works to contribute to open-source projects. From May until August 2020 I focused only on KubeVirt, but after that, I started contributing to others communities such as Prometheus and CNCF SIG-Observability(now TAG-Observability).
Since Prometheus and monitoring was my main focus on previous jobs, it definitely was the community I felt more comfortable with when doing my contributions. I had a good knowledge of the project and my contributions would have a direct impact on what I was doing on a daily basis. Yes, I was unemployed at the moment but I had a couple of side projects that was purely focused on the Prometheus ecosystem :)
After starting a new job my contributions definitely slowed down, but I’m still active here and there… mainly around prometheus-operator and kube-prometheus since I became one of the maintainers. One of the things on my “to improve” list: Do not leave unfinished work for others! Regarding big things: I left an “Observability whitepaper” and also a design document to improve promtool tsdb dump unfinished that I really think that I won’t have time to work on it anymore. Grafana, one of the companies that inspire me the most, has a super clear value that I cannot agree more:
I’m definitely not keeping the 1:1 ratio. Besides those 2 projects, I do have a couple of smaller tasks unfinished for different OSS communities. Although they are super cool ideas that I’d have a good time working on it, it’s hard to find the balance between life in front and away of a computer screen😕
Joined Gitpod!
Another result from a previous accomplishment, contributing to Prometheus and the Observability ecosystem helped me improve a lot! At both soft and hard skills. Also getting involved in different communities eventually led me to get to know about Gitpod (Prometheus got gitpodfied while I was contributing to them).
I can’t deny that Gitpod was not my first option when looking for a job, I was pretty determined that my next job should be a company that is super aligned with my values, an exciting product, and hopefully something that I could use on my daily routine (I remember being super focused on joining either Grafana or Red Hat’s monitoring team back then🤔). A little bit of research on Gitpod’s values and direction as a company convinced me that it was definitely worth getting to know them better. The interviews got me completely on board with the idea of joining Gitpod… super friendly interviewers, the product is obviously super exciting and they were in need of someone that could quickly bring value to the, kinda messy, observability stack that they had back then 🙋.
It really is great, but I’m not gonna be a hypocrite to say it is a perfect company because it isn’t, the definition of perfect changes from person to person, and saying that something is perfect would imply that there is nothing to improve. We had a super stressful third quarter in 2021, I’m not doing SRE stuff because of higher priorities inside the company and I don’t have as many opportunities to build software as I’d like. That being said, joining Gitpod turned out to be, by far, one of the best things that happened during the pandemic! The company is growing like crazy, the effort the leadership(and also colleagues) puts to create a stress-less work environment is far superior to every company I’ve worked for so far, there are lots to learn and do, our team is truly global and it’s awesome to see many different faces/cultures working together.
Something that I’ve noticed working at Gitpod is that everyone is super passionate about at least something tech-related, which is most often also related to what they do in their daily activities. Seeing everyone being so energetic about their tasks feels great! I can’t wait to meet everyone in person when we have the chance 🥰
I moved away from Brazil
I was born and lived my whole life in Florianópolis, Brazil. It’s definitely not a small city, but it’s kinda far from being a global one such as London, New York, Berlin, etc. I guess being locked up at home during the pandemic also made me feel that I was getting locked in this city… I started the pandemic 27 years old and all of a sudden I’m almost 30!? I need to get out of here and explore the world! Thanks to Gitpod, moving away from Brazil was not just a super long-term plan anymore 🙂. I just said “Hey I want to move away from Brazil” and they replied with “Alright, just tell us when”. Asynchronous work enables us to have the lifestyle that we want, companies that work like this are super rare!
Choosing my next hometown was kinda hard, I was in doubt between London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. I ended up choosing London because the parkour and gymnastics scenery here is super strong, there are tons of athletes that I admire for a very long time and I was hoping that I could meet and train with some of them. To my surprise, on my very first day in London, I bumped with Team Phat training on the streets.
I just told them that I also practice parkour and they were super friendly, they even invited me to train with them at some point 😁.
Next holidays I’ll be on the hunt for the Storror boys, Ed Scott, Omid, Travis, and others athletes from the UK. Hope I can train with the people who have inspired me to practice this awesome sport!
Also, while I was sorting things out to move to London, one of my best friends got accepted to work at one of the FAANG companies at the London office! Knowing that she is still physically close to me makes me happy :)
I have fewer friends now
Kinda strange to celebrate that, huh? But yeah, I’m proud of it. Growing up with the mentality of pleasing everyone does get a lot of people around you that you truly believe they’re all friends. As mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, a year of isolation and nothing else to do besides therapy does help to get those things straight in your head.
It’s not like I’ve fought with people I’ve considered friends, it’s just that I learned to prioritize my well-being. I want to spend my time and energy doing things that I truly like to do, to see and support people that have shown that they care about my well-being just as I care about theirs.
I’m not really a guy that takes pictures, so there are people missing (sorry 😓) but here are some friends that made moving out of Brazil a super hard choice.
Y’all know that I left already thinking about coming back to see you ❤
Exercised 6x per week the (almost)whole pandemic
I’ve always been physically active, to be honest, but I thought that staying at home for so long would slow things down. APPARENTLY NOT 💪
Calisthenics is awesome and I’ve enjoyed training it while gyms were closed. As soon as gyms opened again, I’ve got into Crossfit and Parkour classes. Learned the Olympic lifts, learned basic flips such as back and front flip, and a lot of other stuff that I’ve always wanted to learn. There is only one thing that I’ve tried really hard, but ended up failing to learn is the Iron Cross
As mentioned, one of the main reasons for me to come to London is because of the parkour and gymnastics scenery, so I don’t plan to stop learning how to use my body better any time soon :)
Honestly, for anyone out there that needs to deal with depression, getting into a healthy routine and exercising often is probably the best thing you can do for yourself (besides therapy of course). Helps a lot with self-esteem, makes you sleep better, there are tons of papers saying that exercise triggers the release of dopamine and serotonin (hormones that people with depression lack). If you take anti-depressives and don’t exercise, do try it! Probably the best way of stopping using those horrible pills.
Started to enjoy solitude
I believe I started to have problems with solitude when I was still on anti-depressives years ago. “Idle Hands Are The Devil’s Tools” is something that holds true for me back then. I was terrified of getting bored. If I had nothing to do my mind would just start thinking about thousands of things at the same time, anxiety could get so high that it would have physical and psychological effects on me: trembling hands, cold sweat, mood disorder, I could feel my body burning in heat. At that time I was always worrying about what people thought of me, what I needed to do to make people like me and feel included. I did get better at dealing with this before the pandemic, but not to the point of enjoying the solitude. The beginning was super hard, high anxiety almost every day and it only got better after increasing the frequency of my therapy sessions.
Let me tell you, all of those accomplishments I’ve mentioned in this blog so far are consequences of those sessions! My psychologist's focus was to help me understand how to beat those lonely moments by focusing on me, to help me shift those thousand of uncontrolled thoughts into just a couple of ones that would make me excited about my day.
It took me quite some time but being alone is not a hurdle anymore :), from time to time it feels great actually. I don’t feel insecure about the relationships I’ve built in the last year, I can do my own things, I can continue those endless OSS contributions, learn a new calisthenics/parkour movement, study the latest Observability-related projects. It’s really hard to get bored with the number of good things happening lately 😌
So yeah, if you read this far… I’m impressed! This blog post is more of a “me” thing than anything else. One of my 2022 goals, amongst many others, is to write more and I just felt like writing about those things that made me proud of myself 🙂
You can expect more techy blogs in the future…
Cheers!
