The Daily Job as a Software Engineer
My first memory of a computer is from when I was very young - my family had a computer store in the early 2000s, and spending Sundays scanning ranges of IPs with my father always made me feel like a hacker. Unfortunately, at the time, I didn’t yet know that real hackers work at night and wear hoodies - so I never hacked the NSA at 8.
When I was 12, I remember taking my first steps in programming by trying to read The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie: a book I hated at the time, but learned to love a few years later. From that moment on, I can’t remember a time in my life when my hands weren’t on a laptop, writing code (or at least trying to) 🧑💻.
(Un)fortunately, at some point in every developer’s life, passion becomes a job - and the job requires compromises. Don’t get me wrong: making a living from your passion is a great privilege. But can you live with the trade-offs? How do you avoid falling out of love with it? Be honest - developing for work is pretty different from working on your side project in the new hot language and feeling satisfied when your overengineered abstraction magically works.
In your job, you might face crazy time boundaries, poorly designed specs, deal with technical debt, or follow ideas you don’t like at all - ideas that come from someone with more relevance than you for the management (aka the HiPPO in the room). You might end up using tech you don’t like, working on tasks that bore you, or being slotted into a role that doesn’t fit. But still: you’re doing software engineering!
Sound familiar? It’s pretty common - and honestly, it’s okay. Companies need to keep up with business, and tech is just a means to that end. But we can - and should - nurture our curiosity outside of work. We owe it to ourselves to find ways to fall in love with software engineering daily.
But how??? There’s no single answer - I just want to share what has worked (and still works) for me. What do you know about meet-ups? <(°^°)>
Fantastic Meet-ups and Where To Find Them
Pisa, March 31, 2022. I was working at Geckosoft when Antonio Pitasi (my colleague at the time) asked me to join him at an event in Florence. It was organized by a local company together with firenze.dev, and the topic was adapting the Next.js rendering strategy in different situations - something I knew absolutely nothing about.
Despite that (as I later learned), it’s not essential to understand everything you’re about to hear. Plus, it was the perfect chance to forget my daily Angular tasks for a while! (˘｡◡˘)
Thanks to the speaker’s passion and clarity, the event was interesting and engaging. I could say I learned a lot of new things that made me a better software engineer the next day at work - but I’d be lying. And that’s not the point. Meet-ups spark curiosity and give you the chance to explore new ideas. They’re not crash courses. If you don’t understand everything, that’s fine - just jot down anything interesting: a concept, a term, an idea. The real loss would be not meeting people.
And here comes the golden rule: meeting the other participants is more important than the talk itself. I can’t overstate how much this attitude changed my professional life.
The after-event allowed us to meet many new people from different backgrounds (and taste one of the best Florentine steaks I’ve ever had 🥩). Talking to professionals outside your bubble helps you compare your knowledge, your skills, and your workplace’s health. Can you really say you’re a good developer without any benchmark? Can you know your company is healthy if you don’t know how others are run? Not really.
That day gave me so much:
I felt (mentally and emotionally) 100% recharged
I was so excited by what I had learned during and after the talk that I couldn’t wait to get home and dive deeper. All the stress from work melted away. My curiosity and passion reignited, reminding me how important it is to work on things I love. Honestly, the version of me before that event wouldn’t have spent so much time writing this blog post.It made me better at my job
That revitalized feeling changed my attitude: I was more focused, more motivated, and more creative. Reconnecting with the joy of learning helped me see new patterns in my daily work and propose new solutions and technologies.I met passionate people - not just workers
Being a software engineer doesn’t have to be a passion - but for many of us, it is. And meet-ups are full of passionate people like you. (Outside of paid conferences, who else would spend Friday night talking about “work”?)I redefined my goals and ambitions
Growing professionally isn’t just about clocking years of experience. It’s also about planning what kind of work makes you happy. Want to work with a different tech stack? Go find it. Think you’re underpaid? Test yourself in interviews. These things won’t happen on their own.
But how can you understand any of this without comparison? How do you know if you’re underpaid, or thriving in a toxic environment, or just stagnating? I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t broken out of my routine that day.
Hey, but how could it be that I had never attended something like this before - in Pisa? A city with such a vibrant tech and academic scene — it just didn’t make sense! ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)
If You Don’t Find a Home, Make One!
End of May, Gran Canaria. Two months after the Florence event, I was still thinking about how to recreate that same magic in my city (also: I selfishly didn’t want to travel all over Italy just to attend meet-ups). I was on vacation with my friend Antonio (yes, we spend too much time together - our girlfriends agree), and he told me the domain pisa.dev was available. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Pro tip: nothing really exists until you buy a memorable domain. Want to kickstart a project? Step one: buy the domain.
And so we did. Looking back, I can’t say we knew exactly what we were doing - but our goal was clear: give people in Pisa the chance to live the same experience we had. That day, pisa.dev was born.
We had no concrete plans, but we were clear about our values:
- Meet-ups: We’d organize meet-ups with cool speakers from anywhere, and always include a post-event social activity (🍕 was our thing).
- Transparency: We’d be a community, not a company.
- Community-oriented: Anyone could contribute. Our focus would always be on the quality of the content and experience.
- Zerofuffa (I could have translated it into English, but I find it fits better in Italian): no product sponsorships, no clickbait beginner talks. We wanted events even seasoned professionals could enjoy. A community we would be excited to be part of - by professionals, for professionals, enthusiasts, and students alike.
Our community story is quite long: some of the best people we knew joined us, some decided to jump off, and others joined later. Many people contributed to pisa.dev in different ways (contributing to our website on GitHub, hosting events, helping with streaming…). The desire to have a community like ours in Pisa was strong. Our first event sold out in less than a day-astonishing!
In July 2023, pisa.dev turned one 🎂. Stay tuned: new events coming soon! 😎
What I Gained from All This
- I developed a lot of soft skills: In a world of hard skills, where we obsess over frameworks, algorithms, and languages, we sometimes forget how crucial it is to communicate and collaborate well.
- I became active in my community: I attended nearly every event we organized. Twelve events filled with exciting talks and brilliant people.
- I made many new friends: I’ve attended many more events with those same people and shared great experiences beyond meet-ups.
And here we come: how does this relate to our main topic? (ง’̀-‘́)ง
I realized that starting and participating in a community was one of the best ways to fall in love with programming again. And I can’t recommend it enough: attend events near you (or far from you!). You’ll never regret it.
So… What Now?
This post began with the image of a burned-out developer, unaware of what exists outside their company’s walls - someone relying entirely on their job to stay engaged. It ends with a different picture: someone who found in their community a path back to passion.
That developer is me. I now experiment with new (sometimes crazy) technologies at Resource Guru, eagerly await the next conference or meet-up, and stay up at night to contribute to open-source projects - just for fun.
That developer could be you. You just need to find your own way back to what you love (or maybe buy a cool domain and start your own adventure).