Still in it.
Table of contents
I'm Daniel. I write code for a living, which is a sentence I waited most of my adult life to say. This page is the long version of how that happened, and what it looks like now that the job is changing under me.
Full-stack developer, self-taught, working from home in Poland for a German company.
Father of one. Weekend footballer, slower than I used to be.
I like dark mode, side projects, and pizza, in that order on a bad day.
The life that looked fine from the outside
For ten years I was a Class A surface modeler in automotive. If you have ever run your hand along a car door and felt nothing catch, that was someone like me, staring at curvature plots in software most people have never heard of. Up at six, at the desk eight to five, and on a plane more often than not. Detroit, Turin, Sweden, Germany. On paper it was a good career. I had also hit the ceiling of it, and I knew it.
The thing I actually wanted was on the other side of the same screen. I read tech blogs at night. I watched people build web pages on YouTube and thought, I could do that. Then I closed the laptop and got up at six again. For years.
Detroit
My son was born, and my company sent me to Detroit for six months. I missed the part of his life you don't get back. I am not going to dress that up. It was the lowest I have been, and it was also the moment the fear of failing finally weighed less than the fear of staying.
I started with Udemy and YouTube. HTML, CSS, JavaScript. The alarm moved to 5:30, then 4:30, so I could study before the eight-to-five, and I coded again after my son was asleep. I redid the same courses two and three times because nobody was there to tell me what I was missing. Imposter syndrome is a polite name for it. Two and a half years of that, and in December 2020 someone paid me to write TypeScript for the first time.
The job I fought for is changing
Since 2024 I've been at Vaillant, building the web and mobile app that heat pump installers use, in React and React Native. I work from home in Poland. I see my son every day. On the surface, this is the ending.
It is not the ending, because the craft I gave a decade of mornings for is being rewritten while I hold it. I built a full-stack finance tracker with AI in an afternoon that would have taken me weeks in 2020. I love handcrafted code, and I can no longer pretend we have time for it. I don't know what a self-taught path into this industry looks like in three years. I don't know whether the ladder I climbed still exists. I don't have easy answers, and I'm not going to invent them for a nicer paragraph.
Now
What I'm doing about it, in public.
- Building OPTI, my own MCP server, and a content CLI on top of it, so the AI I write with knows my voice and my backlog instead of guessing.
- One email a week about what I built with AI, what broke, and what I'm changing about how I work. Get the next one.
- The same things on YouTube, in English since this year, after years in Polish.
- My habits and my weight, logged on this site. 106.4 kg today, aiming for 94. A streak nobody can see is easy to drop.
If you are where I was in 2018, reading this at midnight with an alarm set for six: the alarm is not the hard part. The hard part is the two and a half years where nothing visible happens. I'll show you what mine looked like.
I still get to say I write code for a living. I'm just no longer sure what it will mean in three years, and I'd rather figure that out in public.
Table of contents