What a crazy 2024! I delivered one of the most challenging projects of my career – building, migrating, and delivering the new Veza website in just four months. Between tight deadlines and technical complexity, we managed to give them full creative autonomy without provider dependency. It’s really great to see how much impact came from that project, now being shared by my dear friend and colleague João Marques at various industry events.
But it came at a cost. The accumulated stress finally broke me. By the end of February I quit and took over half a year to recover, finding solace in helping build my parents Art & Crafts business, Serrestre.pt. Even started crafting some pieces myself. Sometimes you need to step away to see things clearly.
Those who’ve known me for a while know that my heart has always been in the product side rather than in the implementation details. I learned all aspects of building things out of necessity – coming from a place with few designers and developers, combined with never going to college to learn the trade (and make connections) and the result is a self-taught madman. Hell, my goal a decade ago was to have all the knowledge needed to build Facebook (the 2014 version 😅) in a weekend. Crazy, right? But it pushed me to grow every single day.
I lived the startup life for some years and looking back, it’s fun to imagine where I could have ended up if I continued with my dreams. I was ambitious as hell, but all that came to a stop when necessity surpassed dreams.
Duty called and it was required of me to get a job—and a job I got. I still perfectly remember reflecting on my skills and experience and realizing that the easiest and best-paid path was Engineering. It was easier to showcase via my portfolio and, sincerely, my Imposter Syndrome hit hard when I saw job requirements for other more high-level roles. I never imagined I could be and do more than implementation-level roles, even if I already did and had experience doing that.
It’s funny looking back and realizing how deeper and deeper I went from that decision—going from an ambitious Startup Founder to a Creative Technologist role to Creative Engineer to Frontend Engineer—and how that correlates with losing confidence in myself, burning out, dealing with personal issues, mental health, and ultimately hitting rock bottom. Sometimes you need to break to rebuild.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to develop things and I think I can do a pretty great job at that. However, self-imposed limits are not healthy; they are shackles that I’ve realized develop a different kind of burnout → boredom and lethargy. We need to feel challenged for sustainable growth to be possible; if not, you literally rust away.
When you are healthy, you are able to better realize things that a year ago completely passed over your head. Now an alarm rings, you question what the f* are you doing with your life, why you decided x over y, who you are, what you want to do, what you need. You are able to take a deep breath and make conscious changes to improve your life and course-correct.
To be completely honest (I love radical transparency and see vulnerability as strength), I’m still recovering. It’s really hard to fix all the bugs you gained over the last couple of ‘updates,’ but having a strong vision and a well-defined personal roadmap helps to keep me centered and return to what I love the most: to help make good sh*t with awesome, happy, healthy humans by my side.
To all my colleagues and friends who supported me through my worst days and made me a better human – you probably don’t know it, but you were the safety net that kept me from falling further. I’m eternally grateful.
What’s next? Over 2025, I’m transitioning back to Product/Strategy, returning to what made me who I am. Creating well-made, thoughtful products that blend great technology with pixel-perfect design and well-crafted user experiences.
Stay tuned for Good Bleep®! 🤘
