I'm me again

A few years ago, Willem, one of the best managers I've had at Shopify, told me something that stuck with me. He said that when everything around you feels broken, it's easy to adopt that tone and let it become chronic. I've been thinking about that lately.

I'm a person who makes things happen. Pushes things forward. Gets shit done. It might feel autistic at times, and I've made peace with that. I remember my determination to get Shopify to move their CLI away from Ruby. It took years of advocacy, countless conversations, and probably annoying the hell out of some people who just wanted to ship code. Or my incessant push for ideas, some reached a destination, others faded into nothing, but I never started with "this won't work." That was never in my vocabulary.

I was the person who'd see a problem and immediately start building solutions. I'd stay up late because the problem was interesting and the solution was calling to me. Building wasn't something I did. Building was something I was.

And I was always ahead of the curve. Not in a braggy way, just in the way that people who solve problems before they become obvious have to be. I could see where things were heading before everyone else did. But that vision came with a cost.

Some people don't understand where I'm heading. They can't see it. They can't put it into words. And instead of asking questions, they try to put me down. They call my ideas too abstract. They say I'm overcomplicating things. They dismiss my conviction as arrogance. That shit wears on you. You start to doubt yourself because the majority keeps telling you that what you see isn't real. You start to question whether you're onto something or whether you're just delusional.

But that vision came with a cost. The cost of not being able to explain it to people who didn't see what I saw. The cost of watching people nod along in meetings while having no idea what I was actually proposing. The cost of knowing something is right while being unable to articulate why.

There were people who tried to put me down for it. Who called my ideas too abstract. Who said I was overcomplicating things when I was actually simplifying them at a level they couldn't perceive. Who dismissed my conviction as arrogance. That shit wears on you over time. You start to doubt yourself because the majority keeps telling you that what you see isn't real. You start to question whether you're actually onto something or whether you're just delusional.

And the worst part is that I couldn't always put it into words. The vision was clear in my head but came out as fragmented thoughts that people couldn't connect. I'd try to explain where we were heading and end up sounding confused instead of visionary. That gap between what I understood and what I could communicate was exhausting. I watched people nod to my words while missing the point entirely. I learned to stop trying as hard because it was painful to be misunderstood by people who weren't willing to look deeper.

And that frustration built up over years. The constant having to explain myself. The endless conversations where I felt like I was speaking a different language. The meetings where I could see the confusion in people's eyes even when they said they understood. I knew exactly where I was heading but the words wouldn't come out right. I could see the destination clearly in my mind but describing the path felt like trying to explain color to someone who has never seen. You know what you mean but the other person walks away with something completely different.

Some people took advantage of that. They saw my struggle to articulate and mistook it for confusion. They heard my fragmented explanations and assumed I didn't know what I was talking about. They watched me stumble over words while thinking at lightning speed and concluded that I wasn't thinking at all. Those people became loud in meetings. They corrected me when I was right. They dismissed ideas they didn't understand as ideas that didn't make sense. They were wrong more often than they were right, but they were confident in a way I couldn't be when I was busy actually thinking.

And there was nothing I could do about it except keep working. Keep proving people wrong through results instead of arguments. Keep shipping things that shut people up, at least until the next idea came along and the cycle started again. That's what being ahead of the curve costs you. You spend more time defending your vision than executing it, and execution is the only thing that ever made sense to me.

Then some events in the past years had a very negative impact on that attitude. They flooded me with insecurities and a very pessimistic view on everything around me, including AI.

The sudden stop from Shopify's frenzy environment hit me harder than I expected. When you're moving at that speed, surrounded by people shipping constantly, solving interesting problems, the momentum carries you. And then it just stops. Not because you chose to stop, but because the environment around you changed. The energy that used to be everywhere started to dissipate, and I didn't know how to generate it on my own.

Then came the running accident. And that's the sanitized version. What really happened is that a rotted medical system looked me in the eye and said "we don't do cases like yours."

I had something that no one had seen before. Something that didn't fit neatly into their boxes. And instead of being curious, instead of trying to figure it out, they just... rejected me. Every single one of them. "We can't help you." "This isn't our specialty." "We've never done this procedure." "The results are uncertain." Uncertain. That was their word. Their excuse. Their way of saying "this might reflect poorly on our statistics so we'd rather let you suffer."

I paid my taxes. I contributed to the community. I built a life there. And when I needed the system to work for me—for once, just once—it failed completely. Not because they couldn't help. Because they wouldn't. Because uncertain outcomes meant bad metrics, and bad metrics meant less funding, and less funding meant fewer promotions. So they passed me around like a hot potato until I gave up.

No one would help me navigate the bureaucracy. No one would even try to understand what I was going through. I was just another foreigner with a problem. A problem that didn't fit their playbook. And in a system designed around certainty and repeatability, I was an anomaly they were happy to discard.

That experience left me feeling abandoned in a way that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't lived it. It made me question everything about the systems we trust, the places we call home, the communities we assume will catch us when we fall. If the medical system—the one we're supposed to believe in, the one we fund with our taxes, the one that takes an oath to help—如果 they can just walk away from someone who doesn't fit their scripts, then what the fuck are we even building society for?

In the middle of that, I decided to build the company. Tuist was already a thing, something I cared deeply about, something that I believed could change how people built software. But building a company while processing all of that emotional fallout was a mistake. The stress, the uncertainty, the constant pressure to perform while also dealing with a system that had just proven it didn't care about me. All of that permeated into me. It got under my skin and stayed there.

I stopped recognizing myself. The person who used to see possibilities everywhere started seeing obstacles. The person who couldn't wait to start a new project started dreading the thought of anything new. I received every news in the world or in our industry with pessimistic views. Oh? That sucks? Let me tell you why it's actually worse than you think. This idea? It might not work, and here's every reason why. AI? Such a bullshit idea, I like coding. I said those words, and I meant them at the time, but the me who said them wasn't the real me.

I didn't like what I was doing anymore. Every line of code felt like a chore. Every feature we shipped felt hollow. Every conversation about the future felt like wishful thinking. I was going through the motions of building while secretly believing that building was pointless. That nothing mattered. That everything was going to fall apart anyway.

Looking back, I can see how the pessimism was a defense mechanism. If I didn't hope too much, I couldn't be disappointed. If I expected everything to fail, then failure wouldn't hurt. It was a shell I built around myself, and it worked exactly as intended. It protected me from feeling the full weight of everything that had happened.

And some people were all too happy to reinforce that shell. The ones who always said I was wrong before I was right. The ones who took joy in pointing out why things wouldn't work instead of figuring out how they could. The ones who saw my uncertainty as an opportunity to pounce. They weren't bad people, but they were predators in conversations, and I let them shape how I saw the world. Their doubt became my doubt. Their pessimism became my pessimism. And for a while, I stopped fighting it because fighting alone is exhausting and no one was fighting alongside me.

But it also killed something important. It killed the joy. It killed the spark. And I didn't even notice it was gone until it was already gone.

But something has happened, and the spark is igniting back in me. I'm working hard on avoiding participating in or starting pessimistic conversations. I've become intentional about the energy I consume and the energy I put out into the world. Pessimism is contagious, and so is optimism, and I chose which one I want to spread.

I'm tinkering like the early days in Tuist, and having a lot of fun. Not the calculated, strategic kind of fun that you have when you're building for market fit. The real kind. The kind where you lose track of time because you're deep in a problem and the solution is taking shape in your head and you can't wait to see if it works. The kind where you run to your computer instead of walking. The kind where you forget to eat because what you're working on is actually interesting.

Just today, and thanks to the multitasking that coding agents enable, I solved a problem that has sucked for many, many months for us. Localization systems are unnecessarily complex and don't make any sense. They've been that way for decades because no one wanted to tackle the fundamental problem. Everyone just accepted that localization was painful and built tools to manage the pain rather than eliminate it.

And today, I didn't accept it. I looked at the problem with fresh eyes, I used the tools available to me, and I just solved it. Not in months of work. In hours. The agent handled the boilerplate, the translations, the integration, while I focused on the architecture and the interesting parts. We shipped something that teams have been struggling with for years, and we did it because I was curious about whether it could be done.

I'm me again.

And sure, this has nothing to do with Tuist. It's not the main product, it's not the big bet. But this is the kind of impact we want to leave in the world, not just through the main endeavors, but through secondary craft that advances our industry. The small things that make people's lives better. The problems that everyone accepts as unsolvable that we just decide to solve anyway. That's what makers do.

I'm me again. AI has given me the optimism and the joy for building, part of which I had lost. I can say that honestly now because I feel it. The hesitation is gone. The resentment is fading. The person who couldn't wait to start something new is back.

P.S. I'm taking the l10n tool (github.com/tuist/l10n) to the main Tuist repo tomorrow. It's time to see if we can make localization suck less for everyone, not just us. Expect some messy commits and probably a few late nights as I figure out how to integrate it properly. That's the fun part anyway.

I no longer feel that attached to Swift. That statement used to feel like betrayal. I've spent years building expertise in this language, this ecosystem. I contributed to its evolution. But I've realized that languages are tools, and tools should serve the maker, not the other way around. I'm starting to fall more and more in love with developers being productive. With the craft of building itself. With the act of solving problems and shipping solutions. The medium matters less than the message.

I was chatting with someone the other day about how rare it is to find people that fall in love with problems. Most people fall in love with solutions. They want to use the new framework, the new language, the new tool. They want to be seen as modern. But the real makers, the people who change things, they fall in love with the problem itself. They can't stop thinking about it. They see it everywhere. They dream about it.

I think I'm one of those. I've always been one of those. And I almost lost myself.

I'll protect that no matter what, because that's my happiness. The pessimism tried to kill it. The circumstances tried to crush it. The systems failed me and I let that failure become my narrative.

But I'm back now. And I'm building again. And it feels like coming home.