I want to tell you about the year my spark went out, because I think you might be having one of those years right now.
I was at a big tech company. Good salary, good benefits, the kind of job people on LinkedIn say "thrilled to share" about. And every single day, I sat down at my desk and felt nothing. Worse than nothing. I felt like a fraud who'd been gaming the system long enough to land a chair I didn't deserve.
A lot of that came from my managers. There's a particular kind of corporate manager who has perfected the art of making you feel small without ever saying anything clearly mean. The "have you considered" before every idea you proposed. The way your code reviews would come back with comments designed to make you doubt the work, not improve it. The casual mention in a 1:1 that "we want you to grow into the role" when you'd already been doing the role for a year. After enough of those, you stop believing your own ideas before you even pitch them.
I retracted. The community meetups in the city kept happening every week, and I kept telling myself I'd go next time, and I kept not going. I stopped opening side-project repos I'd started. I stopped reading TechCrunch and Hacker News, because every founder under thirty was making me feel like I'd already missed my window. The newsletters I'd subscribed to kept piling up unread. The things that used to delight me about being an engineer just fell quiet.
The wet blanket, not the missing fire
It took me almost a year to figure out something obvious. The spark wasn't gone. The job had just put a wet blanket over it.
I remember the moment it cracked open. I was on a flight, no Wi-Fi, no laptop because the battery was dead, just a notebook and a pen. And I started writing down every wild idea I'd ever had and never built. Not the ones I thought I "should" build. The dumb ones. The ones that wouldn't pass a product review.
What if you could text-to-audio in anyone's voice? Morgan Freeman narrating your grocery list. Tom Hanks reading your work emails. What if you could make an old photograph move? Like, your grandmother in a 1972 wedding photo, but she blinks. She turns her head. What if you could right-click any sentence on the internet and rewrite its tone, make it warmer, sharper, weirder?
I filled probably twenty pages. Most of them were nonsense. Some were already startups. A few were technically impossible. None of that mattered. The point wasn't to ship them. The point was that I had ideas again. I'd had ideas the whole time. I'd just stopped letting myself say them out loud.
The smallest, dumbest version of one of them
I picked the right-click rewrite idea and started building it that weekend. A ChatGPT Chrome extension. Highlight any text on any webpage, right-click, and the extension would rewrite it in whatever tone you chose. It was hacky. The OAuth flow was a disaster. The icon I designed myself in Figma at 2 AM looked like a sad cucumber. I loved it.
I submitted a talk about it to FOSS ASIA. I expected nothing. I got the acceptance email a few weeks later, sitting on the same couch where I'd quietly stopped opening my laptop a year before. I cried. Not in a polished, cinematic way. In the embarrassing, "okay this is too much feeling for a Tuesday" way.
The talk went well. People came up afterward and asked questions. Some of them told me they'd been working on similar weird side things and didn't know if they were good enough to share. We exchanged GitHub handles. The community I'd retreated from a year earlier turned out to still be there, waiting.
What I'd say to past me, and to you
I'm telling you this because I know what your version of this looks like, and I want you to hear it from someone who's been there.
If you're sitting at your desk right now and you can't remember the last time you got excited about a problem, you are not broken. You are not done. You are not "past your prime." You haven't lost your edge. You are working in an environment that has slowly, methodically, very politely told you to stop having ideas. That's a different problem, and it has a different fix.
The spark wasn't gone. The job had just put a wet blanket over it.
Here's what I'd say to past me, and to anyone reading this who needs it:
Make a list of every wild idea, especially the bad ones. Don't filter. The point of the list isn't the ideas, it's the act of remembering you have ideas. Most of mine were terrible. A few weren't.
Build the smallest, dumbest version of one of them this weekend. Not for product-market fit. Not because you're going to launch it. Because the act of writing code that no one asked you for is what reminds you why you started.
Find one place to share it where the room is rooting for you. A community talk. A meetup. A blog post. Not Twitter. Not LinkedIn. Somewhere small where the upside is "people I've never met want to talk to me about this."
The spark doesn't come back in a single moment. It comes back in pieces. A weekend project that surprises you. An email reply from a stranger. A small audience laughing at the part you weren't sure was funny.
Like our girl RiRi, who went from singing "Umbrella" to running a billion-dollar empire, you don't have to know what your second act looks like in order to start it. You just have to remember that you're allowed to want one.