Reigniting the spark through developer experience

2025 was a hard year for me. While I'm sure it can get a lot worse [knocks on wood], much of it was a struggle.

And yet, there were some really incredible things that happened along the way.

Finding wins in a tough year

Before I get into the hard stuff, I want to celebrate some of the bigger wins that happened last year. Most of which Past Me would not have thought possible, or at least probable.

Becoming a runner

Before 2024, I had only run 5 miles consecutively once in my life. In 2025, I trained in the cold, the dark, the rain. I overcame multiple injuries. And I ran a half marathon, smiling most of the time, blowing my goal time out of the water.

That felt huge! I'm still proud of that. And I'm looking to run four half marathons this year.

Nurturing flowers and food

The COVID pandemic helped spark a transition from a mild interest in plants to a mild obsession with them. The last five years have been a series of small improvements and a lot of learning about plants (mostly through failure).

Last year, that work started to pay off. I nurtured a small Zulu Giant plant to flower, which I've been trying to do for years without success.

I also ate food from plants that I grew from seeds. It wasn't much, and you could absolutely view that venture as cost-prohibitive and mostly a failure. But I learned enough that I walked away from the season not discouraged, but with a long list of notes and ideas for really making the garden fruitful in 2026.

Celebrating 10 years of marriage

My wife and I took a trip to Costa Rica for a week without the kids to celebrate our 10-year wedding anniversary (a year late). While there were some missteps and challenges along the way, it's the exact type of adventure we love to take together — in a corner of the world that is spectacular and unlike anything else I've ever experienced.

I aim to go right back there as soon as I'm ready enough to fully (and comfortably) immerse myself in the experience.

Shipping big things at Netlify

I regularly think about how lucky I am to be at Netlify and how hard I've worked to get here. Still, it's easy to overlook what's getting shipped when we're moving so fast.

My team (developer education) delivered on three things that I've been working toward since I walked in that door:

• New doc site: The day I started at Netlify, I could tell the docs site was wildly out of date, difficult to manage, and simply unsustainable. And yet we kept trucking along. It took two years, but we rebuilt the thing from the ground up.
• Shared component library: Also in those early days, I noticed that there was an opportunity to unite the marketing site with the docs site. It also took about two years (and several organizational adjustments) before we could make it a reality. We stood up an internal component library that is now used for both the documentation site and the marketing site. Two developers maintain both properties (together) today.
• Small budget, big conference showing:* As we moved on from putting on our own conferences, I saw an opportunity to show up big out in the community. We identified Render Atlanta as that place. And without breaking the bank, we built the show's most popular booth — an immersive arcade experience, with an integrated web app — for a fraction of what the biggest sponsors paid.

The clouds of confusion

Despite those pretty substantial wins, I was struggling. It felt like a cloud hung over me, preventing these things from feeling like the overwhelming, runaway successes they were.

I attribute this to several factors.

A spike in anxiety

My mental health tanked last year. I've been treated for mild anxiety since 2016. But in 2025, it shifted from isolated, predictable scenarios to a daily struggle. Every day was hard. (That is still the case, but I'm working on it and getting help.)

On the bright side, it got bad enough to prompt real action rather than just sweeping things under the rug and settling for a semi-cloudy feeling. Now addressing this health is a real priority, and it feels like 2026 could be a breakthrough year.

A developer identity crisis

For the first several months of the year, it felt like my whole working world was being disrupted at an alarming rate. I didn't know where I fit in anymore. I didn't know whether to hang with the humans I've connected with who feared and bashed AI, or to jump on the train and embrace it, try it, struggle with it, and form an opinion about where our industry is going.

That was the first six months of the year. During the third quarter, I experienced a real shift in that feeling. More on that below.

Political tensions

Look, I really don't want to get into it here. I try to mostly keep politics out of my writing. So I'll be brief: it's hard to operate at full capacity when I feel like our leaders are actively dismantling the only society I've been part of my whole life. It's hard not to be angry. It's hard not to read and stay informed on the things that make me angrier. It's all very distracting, and I have it easy.

Finding support

By mid-summer, I had reached a low point. I needed to address my mental health with more of a priority and a sense of urgency. And I needed to make an adjustment to what every day looked like, which started with work.

For most people in a similar position — and for me throughout my entire career — that answer meant finding a new job. But while I knew my current situation wasn't right or sustainable, jumping to another organization didn't feel like it'd solve the problem either.

While I was struggling over the summer, two leaders at Netlify noticed something was off. Both approached me individually at different times — not with pressure, but with support. They made exploring hard conversations feel safe, which is a rare and precious thing.

(I often think people don't explore what could be the best option, and end up settling out of fear. I know I have.)

And I was nervous. But I decided to put my faith in myself and take the risk, understanding that if it went wrong, I would still be okay.

Reigniting the spark

While I was navigating this, I found a spark. It came from reframing how I looked at AI in the developer community.

Up until then, I had been conflicted. The inclusive communities I loved — the ones that said "not everyone is a developer, but everyone is welcome" — seemed to be rejecting AI. My conflict was: if I embraced AI, was I also abandoning the values embedded in the communities I adored?

But then an idea struck me: AI is the gate through which a whole new generation of builders are going to enter to build.

The communities that had pushed against the gatekeeping of what it meant to be a real developer — the ones who had helped completely redefine what it meant to be a developer, to be more technical, to be more capable, to ship more code — were becoming the gatekeepers of this industry.

(For the record, while it's too much to get into here, I still share many of their concerns. What I'm addressing here is more about closing gates out of fear, which I'm not cool with.)

I began to see that the opportunity was not in resisting AI, but in educating this new generation of builders. That realization gave me my purpose back.

And still, even with that spark, I wasn't seeing an improvement in my mental health. I felt the excitement about the work coming back, but I still didn't feel like myself.

Making a hard decision

So I went back to those two leaders and decided to explore the conversations. The short version is that we identified that the developer education team was not working, and that I needed to get out of management.

Those conversations were scary. I had to put a lot of faith in myself to even explore them. (I probably did not feel that faith in myself in the moment, but it was there.)

And what came out of them was really hard to accept. Admitting that these two folks were right felt like a failure. I couldn't manage this team and figure out how to make us successful within the organization.

I felt like a bad manager. A failed leader. The reality is that's probably not true. I've been a successful manager and leader many times in the past. But a combination of all the variables in this situation made it unique. I realized it doesn't matter why it's not right. It's just not right. And we need a change, and we need it fast.

In what felt like a mutual decision, we decided to transition me out of management and dissolve the team I was leading.

I moved back into an independent contributor role — developer experience engineer. While the role wasn't explicitly defined beyond a set of bullet points on a job description, it felt more like what I had been doing for years and where I've really thrived in the past.

It felt right almost instantly. Navigating ambiguity is where I'm comfortable. I'm an engineer and an educator at heart. And with this all happening around the same time as that spark returned, it felt like I could really, truly find the time to run with it.

Looking forward

Today I'm working closely with the product and marketing teams to improve the experience for this new cohort of developers by building examples and contributing to foundational tools that offer endless opportunities to build custom AI workflows.

I am pumped up! I am energized!

I still have a lot of work to do on me. Likely a long and arduous journey ahead if I really do want to clear those clouds.

But I am excited to be back doing what I do best — tinkering, building, and teaching. I am endlessly appreciative of the two people who really helped make this happen for me. And I'm proud of myself for building up the courage to explore the possibility.

So here we go!