i'm quitting software — berken eren usar

i’m dead serious.

i’ve been thinking about this for months now, and i finally made the decision. i’m leaving tech. quitting software development entirely. moving to a small village to live the rural life.

why now

look, i love coding. i really do. but there’s something deeply unfulfilling about staring at screens all day, debugging invisible problems, attending meetings about meetings. the dopamine hit of fixing a bug isn’t cutting it anymore.

last month i visited my grandmother’s village. woke up at sunrise. fed chickens. picked tomatoes straight from the vine. ate bread that someone actually baked that morning. no slack notifications. no urgent tickets. no “quick sync.”

it felt like being alive for the first time in years.

the plan

i found a small house with some land. enough for a vegetable garden, maybe some goats eventually. i’m going to learn to make cheese. grow my own food. fix things with my hands instead of typing fixes into a terminal.

will i miss it? probably. will i come back? who knows.

but right now, the idea of never writing another line of javascript sounds like paradise.

to my fellow developers

maybe you’ve felt this too. that creeping suspicion that there has to be more to life than optimizing render cycles and arguing about tabs vs spaces.

there is. it’s out there. it smells like fresh soil and sounds like roosters at 5am.

if you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy the film F for Fake by orson welles. it’s a beautiful meditation on truth, lies, art, and the stories we tell ourselves. highly recommended.