The Ennui Exhibition

Editor’s note: I wrote this post a couple days ago, and then gave a talk at the Cloud Native PDX meetup last night, and came away feeling really energized and had some great conversations. I debated whether or not to even make this post or not. Is it too depressing? I’ve been promising technical content for a while and haven’t posted it, should I do that instead? In the end I decided to go ahead with this post, just because I want to acknowledge the journey. Doing what I’m doing is hard, and it’s a roller coaster. Some days are good, and some days are bad, and sometimes those are the same day¹. So anyways, I super-double-pinky-swear to write some more entertaining technical content next time, but for now, know that you’re not alone on the roller coaster!

Welp the last several weeks have been hard. From a work sense, nothing particularly bad², but there’s been a lot of travel, a lot of frustrating bureaucracy³, some difficult and hard personal news, and just general life busy-ness, and I’m feeling the “soloprenuer blues” a lot.

I gather that this isn’t unusual—Michael Drogalis, one of the bloggers that I follow who is pursuing a similar path, has written about his experiences here, and I’ve seen a bunch of encouraging social media posts about this phenomenon as well. But it’s been almost two years since I started ACRL and… like what am I doing here? Am I actually accomplishing anything good or useful? Objectively I think “yes” but sometimes it feels hard to see that.

Anyways I’m not here to be another voice of negativity, so I wanted to use this post to talk about some of the contributing factors I’m experiencing and what I’m trying to do about them—maybe they can be encouraging for someone who’s in the same boat.

Why things suck

Aside from the general awfulness of everything right now, I think there are a couple of specific technical and business factors that are contributing to my sense of ennui:

• My clients are keeping me busy. Ok this is actually a good thing—I’m doing work and getting paid for it! But working for two clients at the same time is definitely the limit of what I’m able to do, and while I’m enjoying the work that I’m doing for my clients, it has definitely limited my ability to make significant progress on, e.g, SimKube. The development that I’m doing for my own projects is happening in fits and spurts when I can squeeze in the time, instead of being a significant and core part of my week. Coupled with the fact that my next goals for SimKube are pretty significant, this means that I’m avoiding actually getting started on any “big” new work here because I need/want more than 30 minutes at a time to make significant progress here. Instead, I’m making small improvements and spending a lot of time on tooling and related bug fixes⁴. None of this work has been bad, per se—it’s stuff that I’ve wanted to do “sometime”, and I’m justifying it by telling myself that I’m building my skills and learning about new technologies—and it feels very satisfying and achievable to accomplish something here, but at the end of the day, none of that work is helping me pay the bills or get new business.
• The AI hype train is somehow even more insane than ever. At the beginning of the year, I took a break from sales and content marketing on LinkedIn, but I’ve been back at it this last month—which, again, is great. I’ve formed a couple new connections there that may or may not turn into actual leads, but 98% percent of the content on LinkedIn these days is from hype-spewing tech bros telling me how all of my skills and abilities are about to be replaced by AI and if I don’t jump on the AI train I’m going to become a useless husk of a human Just About Any Day Now :tm:. This is… not an uplifting message to be bombarded by on the daily. As I blogged about earlier earlier this year, I have mixed feelings about the current state of AI in general, and I strongly believe that the state of AI abilities is greatly exaggerated⁵, but my goodness. Stop telling me I’m irrelevant, PLEASE⁶.
• Things are just hard and people are messy. I’ve written about this a bit before, but 2025 has just been a hard year so far. The federal government is fucked up, down, and sideways, and is impacting a lot of people (including me!) in ways that we didn’t expect and weren’t prepared for⁷. And it just feels hard to get anything done in this environment. “Oh yes more people are getting forcibly deported into the gulag but look at my Kubernetes simulator!” is a, uh, weird sentence to utter, and yet I feel like I’m uttering it a lot these days⁹. There’s also, as I hinted at above, a bunch of weird personal messy things happening which have been impacting my mental state this year.

What I’m doing about it

But look, I promised at the beginning of this post to not just talk about all the bad things that are happening, so I’m going to finish up with some discussion about specific actions I’m taking to combat some of these feelings.

• Step 1: Refocusing priorities. As much fun as it’s been setting up more AWS infrastructure⁸, I need to stop doing that. I have a number of priorities that I need to be focusing on this year, which I’m going to list out below in an attempt to have some public accountability:
• Keep making my clients happy, and make sure they know that they’re happy with me: As far as I can tell, my clients are really pleased with the work that I’m doing for them, and continuing to do this is the best way for me to get more money in the bank. It’s also a good way for me to do “free” product testing for SimKube in a realistic setting, and potentially build more SimKube-related work into my contracts in the future. So this is (still) my top priority: in addition to doing good work, I need to make sure my clients are aware of the good work I’m doing so that it’s easier for them to keep me on in the future.
• Get the SimKube HPA/VPA functionality going: In my conversations with people around the industry, one of the biggest things that is exciting to people about SimKube is the ability to simulate processes based on external metrics (e.g. Prometheus metrics). This is how, for example, critical components like the Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler work, and SimKube just… can’t do this right now. I know, more or less, what I need to do to make this happen, but I need to actually get started on this, because it will open up a whole set of new markets for me.
• Keep the sales and marketing pipeline going: I have a few folks in various stages of interest in me and/or in SimKube right now, but it’s incredibly important for me to not drop the ball on this. One thing I’ve learned is that sales and marketing is like a flywheel: it’s incredibly hard to get started, but once you have a pipeline going, it’s easier to keep it going. So what I really need to do here is make sure it doesn’t stop, because I don’t want to have to repeat all the effort to get it going again. Concretely, this means that I need to start getting ready for KubeCon this fall, because that’s been my most successful “marketing venue” thus far¹⁰¹¹¹².
• Step 2: Ignore the AI hype wave. Look, I’m turning 40 this year, which is when apparently all the old tech workers get put out to pasture, but I ain’t &$(^ing done yet. I’m not irrelevant and I’m not going to listen to the voices trying to tell me that I am. I’ve been explicitly seeking out some competing voices to help provide a more rational and realistic point of view¹³, and I think it’s time for me to get off LinkedIn again, because I don’t need that in my life right now.
• Step 3: Go to therapy and donate money. I’ve been in therapy off-and-on for the last decade or so, and more regularly for the last couple years. This is also maybe something that not every high-powered software engineer admits to, but therapy is great actually¹⁴. This has been a great spot for me to help process all of the everything that is going on around the world and at home.

I’m also looking for places that I can use my business to donate some money to try to help folks out right now. Last year ACRL sponsored a scholarship for The Diana Initiative, and I’ve been considering whether I want to do that again—but also I want to find more and other places I can donate money to help underrepresented folks in tech. That feels like one of the most concrete and immediate actions that I can take to combat some of the disgusting nonsense that’s taking place today; I just need to get off my butt and do it.

Anyways: I know all of you come and read this in different spaces and different mindsets, and I do genuinely actually have more technical content to write about again in the future, but hopefully this post is actually helpful for some other people out there who are in a similar spot to me.

As always, thanks for reading! Until next time,

~drmorr