A collection of my long-form thoughts on building Calmly, exploring the mental health of software engineers, and looking towards the future of healthy and fulfilling work.
Postmortem mindfulness is the practice of reflecting on emotional reactions at work to understand triggers, build self-compassion, and create mental space between events and responses. By regularly practising, individuals can respond more intentionally, fostering healthier workplace interactions and aligning their actions with their values rather than reacting impulsively.
A story of a codebase that was once a tangled mess of if statements and edge cases, and the state machine that brought order to the chaos.
I was riding a caffeine and sugar high one afternoon, stumbling around the internet looking for a solution to a problem I was facing: How can I keep the backend for Calmly (a mental health Slack chat bot I'm building) hidden away from the public internet while sending it messages from my Next.js frontend? Then I was hit by the Postgres elephant in the room - the database I'm already using can act as a message queue!
🚀 Just deployed the backend of Calmly - a tool I’m building to support mental health for software engineers - using fly.io, and it was an unexpectedly smooth ride! 🙌
I strive towards optimism, looking for hope and excitement for the week ahead. But allowing others to inadvertently dictate where my focus gets spent is a fast track to despair.
Ever found yourself the last one standing in a silent office, your computer screen casting the only glow in the darkness? I've been there, and it took a scream in that darkness for me to realise something was off.