I almost quit engineering in 2019. Here's what brought me back.

In 2019 I almost left engineering. I want to write about what brought me back, because someone reading this might be in the same place.

I was at a TV streaming company, fixing bugs nobody noticed, on a stack nobody loved. I had stopped reading code outside work. I had stopped writing. I had a daughter and a mortgage and a feeling that the next ten years would be a copy of the previous one.

The unlikely turn

A government contract - the kind everyone tells you to avoid - dropped onto my desk in late 2018. CMS work for the Punjab Information Technology Board. Boring on paper. But the constraints were so brutal, and the users so real, that I started caring again. Five thousand digital resources. Forty percent more access to educational content. People I'd never meet, learning from something I helped ship.

"What brought me back wasn't a better stack. It was a colder reminder of who the work was for."

I'm writing this seven years later, having shipped at scale, having built ventures, having advised governments. The thread back to that contract is unbroken. If you're in a place that feels stuck, the move is not to chase a shinier stack. It's to find a user.