Hi, I'm Cesar, a Senior Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience.
In 2023, I got sick and burned out.
In 2024, I was laid off and even rejected from FAANG.
I used the time between jobs as a mini-sabbatical to recover.
Writing became part of my therapy, and dev.to was a big part of the journey.
Hitting the Top7 and encouraging comments pushed me to keep writing.
Since then, I've been turning my lessons into posts and books.
My goal is to complete a trilogy before I retire (hopefully before I'm 60).
I already published the second one, Street-Smart Coding, and I'm working on a prequel.
This week, I'm celebrating my 7-year anniversary on dev.to.
Ask me anything about coding, burnout, or writing.
I don't have all answers, tho.
Or simply stop by to say Hi.
Top comments (61)
Hey Cesar! Hope you are well and congrats on the 7 year anniversary on dev.to!
Mostly stopping by and saying Hi :D
Though, I am wondering about the last 7 years at DEV. What changed in your perspective and what makes a Senior Software Engineer...Senior? Thanks :D
For me, there's one true sign of being Senior: when you stop optimizing/refactoring/cleaning/perfecting because you know when a solution is good enough.
Thanks for stopping by!
Hey Cesar! Hope you feel better now. 7 years here? Wow! Ill celebrate my first year on dev.to next month!
Hi Pascal. Yes, 7 years with different levels of participation and engagement. Congrats on your first year!
Thank you for sharing this, César. It takes real courage to lay out both the highlights and the hard parts of a 10-year journey. Wishing you strength as you rebuild — and I hope you find work that truly values the person behind the code.
With your 10 years of experience, I’m curious: what’s your take on the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) economy and Cloudflare’s ultimatum to Google? Starting September 15, 2026, the default will be to block mixed-use crawlers like Googlebot. Do you see this as a pivotal moment that forces the search and training bots to split? Does it change how you think about the value of web content in the agent era? Would love to hear your perspective.
This is a discussion worth having. But I don't have a strong/solid opinion at the moment. It's true that we fed the bots and now they're charging it for access. Kind of weird, isn't it?
Yes! There's no more value in how-to tutorials when there's a magical text area and a button that figure out what we want. If we want to stand out, we have to give what AI can't.
That's exactly the paradox, isn't it? We spent years feeding the machine with our content, and now the machine wants to charge us to access what we created.
But you're right — the real value shifts to what AI can't generate: proprietary data, real-time on-chain intelligence, and machine-readable APIs. That's why I shifted AgentShare from human-facing price data to DeFi intelligence for agents. The market will pay for data it can't synthesize itself.
What kind of 'AI-proof' value are you thinking about building?
At the moment, I'm working on a book trilogy to share everything I've learned and I wish someone had told me.
That's a beautiful project — a book trilogy is the kind of work that outlasts any API or framework.
I think the most valuable thing you can share is the story behind the lessons: the failures, the pivots, and the moments you almost gave up. AI can generate a tutorial, but it can't generate lived experience.
Wishing you clarity and flow with the writing. If you ever want to discuss the intersection of storytelling and AI, I'd be happy to exchange notes.
Cesar, 7 years and a trilogy out of a layoff and a FAANG rejection is a hell of a return on a bad year.
"Writing became part of my therapy" is a line I could've written myself, just with different specifics . mine's a contract and an OS instead of a diagnosis.
Did the first post you wrote through it feel like therapy while you were writing it, or only in hindsight once the Top7 hit and people responded?
It was a tough year, but I prefer to remember it as the year I chose myself and started my reinvention.
It was more going back to the habit and reflecting on every stage of my career. The first posts I wrote around that time were about the lessons I had learned in every milestone of my career. Hitting the Top7 and the engagement was confirmation to keep doing it.
Not a question — just recognition. I sit on the opposite side of your table: I'm a physical therapist by trade, and burnout recovery is literally the work I do with patients. Reading "in 2023 I got sick and burned out, in 2024 I was laid off" from inside a career, instead of across a clinic desk, landed differently.
One thing I tell people in recovery that your post already lives out: the goal isn't to get back to who you were before it broke — it's to rebuild into someone the same thing can't break the same way twice. You didn't sprint back into a job, you turned the wreckage into a book, and then a trilogy. That's not just healing; that's redesigning the load so it stops landing on the same joint.
The dev.to part is real, too. I found this place late and used it the same way — writing here became somewhere to think out loud and get told the thinking wasn't crazy. If a question helps: what's the one habit from before the burnout that you've deliberately refused to carry into the rebuild? Rooting for all three books.
I only code for work..and I've learned to diversify my sources of joy. Before, my career was probably one of the most important parts of my life. And when I lost that with a layoff, it took away my sense of joy and accomplishment with it.
That lands, and it quietly finishes the metaphor from my first comment. Putting all your joy into one joint means that when the joint goes, everything it was carrying goes with it — you didn't just lose a job, you lost the only thing the weight was resting on. Diversifying the sources of joy is the same move as spreading a load: not because any one source is weak, but because a single point of failure shouldn't be able to take the whole system down with it.
In my work I see it constantly — the people who recover best aren't the strongest, they're the ones whose life doesn't route entirely through one thing. You rebuilt the load-bearing structure, not just the muscle. "I only code for work" might read as smaller to someone else; from here it reads as someone who found out where the weight actually belongs. Genuinely glad you came out the other side pointing at it. The trilogy's lucky to have that behind it.
Great analogy! Hope you don't mind if I use it somewhere else :)
Thank you for writing this so openly — the part about not tying your identity solely to your career really landed with me.
I'm in a similar chapter, just earlier in the climb out. I was laid off, and most of my experience is deep in one stack — PHP, many years. I'm finding it hard to land roles in the same tech, and I'm unsure which way to move: go deeper, branch to something adjacent, or pivot entirely.
What struck me was your take that AI isn't a direct threat and that much of the fear is manufactured. I want to believe that — but from where I sit (one stack, tight market), it's hard not to feel the ground shifting.
So my question: for someone specialized in a single stack and rebuilding right now, how would you think about where to invest the next couple of years? And what helped you separate real signal from the fear when you chose your own next step?
Wishing you the best on the trilogy. 🙏
Figuring this out myself too...The first answer that comes to mind is be a big fish in a small pond...and definitely see how to incorporate AI tools to assist your processes.
The fear is still there. I just build an insurance policy by freelancing on the side. So worst case scenario I have my basic expenses covered.
Thanks, Cesar. Honestly the part that stuck with me was you saying you're still figuring it out too, and that the fear doesn't really go away. I've been feeling behind because I don't have it sorted — good to know that's kind of just the deal.
The small-pond point makes sense. I've been trying to be okay at everything and it's exhausting. Probably smarter to go deep where my PHP years actually count for something.
The freelancing safety net is the real one for me though. Hard to think straight when you're worried about the basics. I think I need to fix that part first.
Appreciate you actually taking the time to reply properly. Good luck with the books.
We're all figuring this thing called life as we go :)
Hey Cesar! 👋 Happy 7 years on dev.to and congrats on everything you’ve built back from such a tough chapter.
Also, “Street-Smart Coding” is a great title. 😄 Wishing you good health, great writing sessions, and that trilogy completed long before 60!
Thanks. It was a moment of inspiration. That wasn't the original title, by the way.
Thanks for stopping by! May the Force be with you!
They say "write tests, not just code," but nobody tells you that sometimes you also have to write your way out of a burnout. I have been there—staring at the screen, knowing exactly how to fix the bug, but having absolutely zero energy to move the cursor. The code still works, but you do not. That is the part they do not put in the job description.
Thank you for sharing this so openly. The fact that you turned a layoff and burnout into two books and a DEV writing streak is genuinely inspiring—not because it is a "success story," but because it is honest about the struggle. I think a lot of us in this industry quietly carry the weight of rejection, exhaustion, and imposter syndrome, and seeing someone lay it out like this makes it a little lighter.
One thing I am curious about: you mentioned writing became part of your therapy. Was there a specific moment or post where you felt the shift from "I am writing to process" to "I am writing to teach"? I have found that line blurs more than I expect, and I am always interested in how other people navigate it.
Also, congratulations on the 7-year DEV anniversary. That is longer than most startups survive, and definitely longer than my last New Year's resolution lasted. Keep writing, keep coding, and keep being honest about both.
The line is blurry. I started to write for my younger self. Just thinking of lessons learned from getting a job, being fired, and a layoff helped processing it.
Your timeline hits closer to home than you'd think — I'm writing a fiction series about engineers who get replaced by AI and have to rebuild from scratch. The line from the top comment, "the goal isn't to get back to who you were before it broke — it's to rebuild into someone the same thing can't break the same way twice," is basically the thesis of the whole thing. Glad writing pulled you through. Rooting for that trilogy before 60 💪
Thanks for your comment. Definitely, going back isn't an option. Just thinking about how I felt made me anxious.
I'd love to ask for your advice on publishing. What are some good publishing channels? I'm planning to publish my 36 Stratagems series and the prequel/old series, but this is my first time dealing with anything like this — I have zero experience and no clue where to start. Would really appreciate any help you can offer.
Definitely, Amazon KDP. It's the largest library online. I use a combination of Gumroad and Amazon. But just don't expect to publish your book and have an audience right away.
If you're working on your first book, start by testing/sharing your ideas first. I like to think of a non-fiction book as the compilation of my best ideas on a subject. That's what I do for my books: all the ideas started as social media posts, then blog posts, then book material.
Hi Cesar, congrats on seven years on DEV!
Going through illness, burnout, and a layoff all at once sounds incredibly rough. I’m glad writing gave you a way to process it, and it’s pretty amazing that it eventually grew into books and a whole new direction.
Did writing change the way you think about your engineering career, or did it mainly help you find your way back to it? Can you introduce your book?
The whole experience changed the way I see coding. I joke saying I'm not a passionate coder anymore. These days, I have stronger boundaries around work and leisure. For example, I only code during working hours at work.
Sure! Street-Smart Coding is a roadmap with 30 lessons to sharpen your coding skills. I wrote it because my real coding journey started after college with one Google search: "how to get better at coding."
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