Reflecting on Two Years

So it’s been two years since I left Sweden for Portugal, huh?

Wow. Time flies.

A lot of things have happened since. The good and the bad.

The Bad

The bad is navigating my field in the age of AI. “AI itself” is not the culprit, but I would definitely be lying if I said that I haven’t noticed, even among peers, that AI has a profound impact on how developers are managed. It has warped expectations, pushed juniors below the surface, cranked expectations on seniors. We are all generalist expert ICs all of a sudden, ownership scope widens, the days of mindful approaches are limited to product… for web it’s often an afterthought.

I’ve been playing around a whole lot since GPT-3 and tested every hyped model out there. And there are great benefits to leveraging AI for my field, for sure. But the caveats are these oscillations in corporate approaches… It feels quite scary that corporations put that amount of faith in what is in the end a data-sucking, lambda-throttled SaaS from a private company that might not have your company’s best interest in mind. The code you generated with it, or even gave access to scrape, might be incredibly similar to what your competitor gets their hands on when they crank up the gas bill and try to compete with you.

There’s also been a lot of health scares with the family of my loved one. And I haven’t even met anyone except my mom, my dad and two friends since I left Sweden… I’d like to be able to take a proper vacation and visit as soon as possible.

Guess I’m also bummed that the weather is starting to give out over here. I’m not cut out for the winters here.

Won’t even comment on politics, the economy or the geopolitical situation. If you’re 100 years into the future reading this, I bet even you have a clear picture of the time in which this was written…

The Good

Well the good part is that me and Margarida are super-close with getting our house plans in order. We have the money for it, the bank statements, we are doing all we can to find the home of our dreams and I sense that at any moment we’ll finally move into the house of our dreams.

And things are good with me and Margarida. We can weather whatever comes our way.

I hope that I’ll spend 2026 in our own home. That my parents will be able to visit, that I’ll stick with the job I have and that the trajectory is going up and not down across the board.