Published on: 2026-03-20
Sometimes you need to take a break and come back stronger
Written by: Darryl `Ryuujisan32` Williams
Published on: 2026-09-28
if you’ve been following this journey of mine, you ,ight have noticed that i took a break. It wasn’t for lack of love of the game, but lack of direction. With all the changes in the field and several dozen layoffs across the industry, i was struggling to find where i fit; could that with struggling to find work and i was in a bad space. Everyone was thratening that AI was replacing Juniors and Associate engineers, and for a while, i believed them. It certainly definitely seemed that way. It wasn’t until i took a step back did i see how much crap that resally was.
These so-called founders needed us to believe that we were obsolete, that our expertise had become commoditized. This was categorically false and the truth raised it’s ugly, but welcome head this past year. These self proclaimed AI engineers were deploying at speeds that no senior dev was getting close to. They had MVPs ready in a week and a working app done in less than two. Engineering was dead…..until their API keys were leaked. Overnight you saw spikes of hundreds of peoples accounts compromised by wreckless app dev practices. No encryption at all, API keys uploaded straight to Github, no authentication practices, it was a bloodbath. Now enter where things got interesting: would you believe these people were now hiring those ‘obsolete’ devs to fix their apps. worst yet, they were still indignant and rude about it like we should be begging them for work.
All of this is going on and I realixed something: I was being entirely too critical of myself. Engineers are known to be perfectionists and i am no different. I often hesitate when outcome isn’t clear. i wont be doing that anymore, instead, i’m going to share more of my thought process, the good and bad. If the people like it, great, if they don’t, i’ll pivot. I won’t delay on overthinking. So i set out to get a new AI integration cert and ‘upskill’ to modern times. We will see where it goes. Either way, i’ll grow from it.