Wanna see something cool?

I’ve been working on a thing for the past few weeks. I’ll dive into what it actually does in a future post — this one’s a little more “meta.”

At first, the project was just an excuse to learn Go while getting some hands-on experience with AI-assisted development. But it turned into something I didn’t expect.

I kind of fell back in love with writing code

Lately, I’ve been feeling… stagnant. Projects at work that would’ve excited me just two years ago don’t have that same moth-to-lightbulb pull they used to. Was I burning out? Aging out? Falling behind?

Turns out it was none of those things. Let’s back up for a second.

When I first transitioned from a background in Technical Support and IT to becoming a developer in 2013, I was thrilled to finally get paid to write code. I dove in headfirst, learning fast — fueled by pure excitement.

Back then, I was a Customer Support Manager at a startup that, well… didn’t really have many customers. That led to conversations about what else I could help with, and I jumped at the opportunity. I picked up anything the developers didn’t want: mostly maintaining build systems and writing scripts for system setup and automation.

At the time, “state-of-the-art” meant Jenkins with ephemeral AWS build nodes (I know! Even then! Crazy, right?). Remember, this was 2013 — there was no Terraform, no Packer, no Kubernetes, not even Docker yet. We did have Chef, though — and I loved Chef: the cookbooks, test-kitchen, knife, berkshelf, plus the perfect companion tool, Vagrant. This meant diving into Ruby, because that whole ecosystem was Ruby-powered. Ruby still holds a special place in my heart, even if these days I’d probably struggle to write it from scratch. (Turns out even mental “muscles” atrophy if you don’t exercise them.)

Fast-forward to a few weeks ago: about three days into my side project, I realized something important. It’s not just coding I love — it’s how things are made. It’s the communities of humans behind these ecosystems, building the tools and platforms we all rely on. That’s what’s been missing from my day-to-day. That’s what led to that “lost that lovin’ feelin’” feeling.

Learning Go has been a blast — and it’s just the beginning. The Golang community reminds me a lot of the early Chef community: welcoming, collaborative, and full of people who want to build great tools together. I’m honestly kicking myself for not getting involved sooner. The build tools are simple, elegant, cloud-native, container-first, and beautifully composable. More importantly: I found myself wanting to work on my side project most nights after ${JOB} tasks were done. I fell back in love with it.

As for the AI piece — well, let’s just say it’s been a ride.

Like many others, I leaned on my AI assistant for the usual stuff: generating unit tests for newly written functions, drafting boilerplate code… …and then wrestling with it to make its own tests actually pass.

Honestly? Working with AI right now feels a lot like cooking dinner while an over-enthusiastic toddler “helps.” You want to encourage the enthusiasm because you know they’ll eventually be a big help — but wow, would dinner be ready a lot faster without the “help.”

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