Swinging back to positivity

I’m a person who tends to look at things through a positive lens. Or at least, I used to. 2023 was a bit of a traumatic year for me professionally, and that led me to a negative mindset full of disillusions.

The first one of those events was the Shopify layoffs. For someone who has experienced layoffs before, and that has faced the realities of how businesses operate, that shouldn’t have been a big deal. But it was for me. I over-committed to the company and the people I worked with, believing I was on a long-term and successful journey there. That’s what they told me, and that’s what I believed. But then one day, you are faced with reality. In my case, I was part of the German workforce that supported the unionization efforts. Workers understand their rights. What could be wrong with that? Everything. Techno-optimists and builders, as they like to call themselves, don’t understand of anything that hinders their path to wealth and power. If there’s something that gets in their way, they’ll get rid of it, throwing money at it if needed. That reality shock led me to trace back everything that happened during my time there, and could see a different angle to the whole story. From the removal of the ‘dropshipping’ word from everywhere after having benefited from it for years, through the support of crypto and NFTs, to the green-washing of the company’s activities. It was all a big lie. It felt like a toxic relationship that’s hard to escape from and whose big picture you can only see once you are out of it. There’s professional growth, but at what cost? I was let go with a mental exhaustion that I’m still recovering from. I couldn’t look at other companies without wondering, will they be the same? I started to see patterns everywhere, like having a name for the family (e.g. “shopifolks”), or people continuously talking about how the company changed their lives for the better. I had huge respect for Tobi and his ideas, but I’m having a hard time buying into them now.

I felt so relieved when the layoffs happened, but you can’t just get rid of the trauma that easily. It’s something that comes back to you here and there. You try to look forward and stay positive, but you have this feeling that you can’t trust anyone anymore. Has it happened to you? My escape was to focus on my projects, and in particular Tuist. We built a healthy community and project, in which we could continue to invest, and build something that we could be proud of and that people would be inspired to use and contribute to. I threw myself into the project, working full-time every day. I built a new website, put a plan in place for the rest of the year and started working on it, continued to help more companies get onboarded. People loved the project, and that love for the project fueled us to keep going towards a sustainability point where we could work on it full-time. But in that process, we made the project so financially attractive, that a company like Bitrise thought it was a great idea to wrap it into their product without contributing anything back. And here comes the second trauma. We had to make a quick decision to prevent them from hurting what had taken us 6 years to build. The result? A website telling everyone how terrible deciding for Tuist was, explicitly mentioning me as a bad maintainer for the project. If I didn’t have enough with Shopify’s micro-trauma, there is another one to add to the list. Luckily, I’m surrounded by great humans, among whom are my lovely wife, María José, my partner in Tuist and Tuist Cloud, Marek, and the Tuist community itself. They know me well, they know my values and supported me through this emotionally difficult time. Still, like Shopify, is that one thing that you can’t get rid of easily.

I started feeling disillusioned with the often cruel reality of the tech industry. This disillusionment grew a lot of negativity in me, which often resulted in a lot of public criticism as if I could change anything by doing so.

But I’m working on changing that. Criticism does more harm than good to me. If there’s something that has always been there, that motivates me to keep going and inspires me to build things, that’s having a community of people that I can work with on solving exciting problems. And that’s something that open-source provides me with. I’m a very community-oriented person. Building in isolation with the only goal of profit is not something that I enjoy. However, doing it sustainably is something to keep an eye on (thanks Bitrise for the lesson), and that’s something that I’m working on. Open-source changed me. I met many wonderful and talented people, some of whom became friends. I see on Mastodon what open-source communities are capable of, and I feel I want to be inspired. When I’m in these communities, I feel I’m in a safe place and very positive. It’s when I get closer to the tech industry, in its purest form, which is often on Twitter (X), that I start to feel negative. Perhaps the algorithms are contributing to that.

The micro-traumas of 2023 grew negativity in me, but I’m finding my way out of it thanks to open source and communities. I’ll stop criticizing, and start building things that inspire positivity. 2024 is going to be an exciting year.