A bit of a change

It's not a radical change. I am not starting a new career as a music producer, a barista or an interior designer (for now), I am still going to be very much around tech and web communities.

As of today, I am a documentation engineer. I can list a thousand reasons why this is scary for me, the main one being that after a long time the things that defined whether I am doing a good or a bad job are now different.

There are equal chances I will like this, or not, but I am up for the journey.

# Wait, this actually makes sense

In recent years I worked mainly on platform teams and design system projects. I became really good at it. I love it when my users are other developers.

I ended up as the lead of most of those design systems I worked on, and one of the things I took to heart was working in the open and documenting our tools, despite how much managers and leadership didn't value it.

I didn't care about the extra effort. What is not documented will be misused, or not used at all. That is my mantra.

Looking back at it, this feels like a natural move.

# Yes, this makes a lot of sense

After my first year of being a "professional" web developer, with "professional" meaning I was paid a salary, I immediately started a blog.

The goal wasn't to publish constantly, but to put out pieces about what I learned during my first years of development. Some of which turned into days and nights of research, because I care about what I publish, even if nobody reads.

Then, I wrote on webpack's blog, which led to my first CSS-Tricks article, and later a piece on Smashing Magazine, crossing something from my bucket list. You guessed it, my bucket list is nerdy and uninteresting.

Along with all these, I started speaking at conferences, presenting at meetups, giving workshops, and suddenly I felt leaning naturally to "devrel" territory.

I tried a lot of times to move my career in that direction, but I only failed. I failed to move internally in the companies I was at the moment, and failed at several interviews. In some, I was really close.

# Then, I stopped

After the pandemic, developer relations departments shrunk or just disappeared from most companies. In the meantime, I kept accumulating bad job experiences.

This included toxic working environments, terrible stakeholders and leadership, and basically no career path opportunities.

It affected me so much I just stopped writing, speaking, or doing anything at all.

# Then, I was back

I took some time off after a round of layoffs which luckily included me.

During this sabbatical, I tried to spark some new excitement by building from scratch my personal site. I even bought a new domain, slashing the fairly good search positioning my site had, but who cares.

I wrote a bunch of articles in a short span of time. I was back at it, or sort of.

By this time I was also looking for a job, and serendipitously on a careers page I saw a "Senior Documentation Engineer" position, and told myself maybe now was the right time to do something a bit different.

I always wanted to use the word "serendipitously" and now I am scared I misspelled it. If I did, please ignore it.

So, now my main job will be writing, coding proof of concepts, education and overall doing anything to make developer's life easier, which it's actually what I loved the most while working in tech.

# Wrap-up

In the end, it's not such a huge detour, and I can always go back to product engineering whenever I feel like it.

The truth is I have no idea what will happen next, but it's one of those moments where uncertainty is a good feeling to have.