Martin de Lima

It's too much man, what the fuck's going on, what's my place in all this

2026-03-10T00:00:00Z

Godammit. Any of y'all just…feel awful about their life's trajectory, and you make these wishy-washy blog posts or maybe videos or social posts or whatever, where you go "I have decided that I'm going to do some...thing" and then end up with months of radio silence cause surprise, the thing's actually hard (or, let’s be real, takes work)? Or other shit gets in the way? Or whatever excuses you have and you feel bad and you're just exhausted cause working a shitty job and paying bills and dodging news headlines like a tommy gun rat-tat-tatting at your feet is a lot to deal with already?

Well I do! Man. Fuck. It's too much man, what the fuck's going on? What's my place in all this? And I have a child??? The audacity of anyone in this accursed timeline to bring forth progeny. And I have to give her a good life, convince her there's good in the world as I myself…well actually I do see it, just not in…*waves arms around* alla this. But you know what I mean? I thank my parents for the gift of life, but jeeeeezus do you really win some and lose some.

We really oughta been winning some! A lot more than some! The fuck’s up with billionaires? Gimme dat money fool! Y’know Maslow’s heirarchy of needs? Rich people got the bottom two rungs, and the weight of the money’s squashing the others out. Meanwhile, we sorry fucks barely get up there cause we got bills to pay. Just even it out, maaan.

Shit wait wait, that’s its own thing. Let’s get back to: where. WHERE does life fit into this post-capitalist Matrix nightmare?

Fuck careers

Look at me, snivelling about how “oooh I should have been a designer” and then proceeding to snivel privately instead of publicly to avoid confronting that I don’t put in the work. I don’t wanna do shit anymore. I don’t want a career. I want a JOB. That PAYS me decent, and lets me FUCK OFF. I don’t want to be the very best, like no one ever was. Especially not at optimizing user interfaces to maximize user engagement. FUCK that.

When I “left” the tech industry (i.e. no one would hire me), I said I was tired of all the bullshit. Now that I’m in a different thing altogether…I should have known this, but…whoop de doo Basil, it’s just a different flavor of bullshit! I’m tired man. Just gimme my money. I don’t want to serve any company’s needs. I want to serve me (and serve cunt. mwah!).

Fuck: life, or rather, its…what’s the word. Prerequisites?

Life’s—life’s actually pretty great man! As long as you get to live it! (and you live somewhere that isn’t awful, like, oooh, ummm, the Philippines.) Humanity’s really good at some stuff. Have y’all seen, like…movies??? Those are things we just watch like whatever, so taken for granted that that Netflix “Are you still watching?” screen is not even a real question anymore. The answer’s stopped mattering.

So they were filming a movie on our street one time. Made it look like New York. Changed the license plates on the parked cars, made all the lights yellow, brought NY rubbish bins, put up a fake store to fill in an empty storefront, and, crucially: added more garbage onto the streets. So authentic! And there were cranes and and lighting people and whatever crew they got just buzzing around the whole day. All to shoot what’s probably not even 15 minutes of a complete film. It’s really cool seeing that get made in front of us. Some people actually do cool shit like that. That’s real nice. Even if whatever that movie was turns out bad, I saw the work put into it. That shit was real.

As an aside to anyone making anything and just throwing it out there: yeah, I see your shitty thing. I love you. I can feel how happy you were making it, and how embarassed/proud you are putting it out into the world. Keep doing it baby. It’s lovely.

We should all have the capacity to be doing cool shit like that. There’s probably 6000 Rembrandts out there not materializing cause some asshole thought their side of the mountain looked like a nice harvesting point.

Another aside: Oh my god how do these fucking billionaires creep into everything. I guess all I’m’s saying’s is, in an age of incredible abundance, a more even spread would be…really nice, for starters.

Fuck—let’s do something, dudes. Squeeze all that can be squoze.

I uh, I. Where was I going. I like a lotta things man! There’s so much nice shit out there. I think what I’m trying to say is: let’s enjoy it! Fucken—let me enjoy it!!! Let me—let me make summa that! It looks heeella fun. I dunno. Let’s just do cool shit. Enough of these hokey career trajectories and life goals. I don’t want a fucken house. I want a liiiife.

Walking back…the long, hard, stupid way

2025-08-21T00:00:00Z

It’s been over a year since I left the tech industry. Since then, I’ve recognised that I was very unwell, got diagnosed with major depression, and went into therapy. I feel like I’ve recovered mostly. It’s been pretty good! Mentally, if not financially. More on that in a bit.

After alla that, I’ve decided to sincerely try and be a freelance designer. Hell of a circling around, but so it goes.

This was my fault too

I did get burnt by a lot of the work cultures where I’ve been, and I still curse and wail and gnash my teeth against the greater tech industry. But: I really did stagnate and remain in my comfort zone as time went on, choosing to do the bare minimum as self-defence. I knew the purist frontend role was fading away; I could have pivoted fully to design roles and be happier for it. Yet I did little more than send out a bunch of applications. As much as I could blame employers and industry changes, I brought myself here too.

The web still has good in it

Despite the time and distance, I still really do love the web. Mostly it’s blogs. I feel that the blog is the purest form of all that is good in the web. Behind every sincere blog is a sincere person who’s singing their song out loud, hoping someone across the wires will hear.

I also love all the little web apps people build, the ones you know aren’t there to be the next Facebook or Jira or whatever slop we’re stuck with currently. Tools and toys over factories and houses of mirrors. We need humanity back in the web, and I want to help towards that.

Employment really ain’t it I think

I’ve recently gotten an admin job at a small college, and I find that I still have the energy and motivation to do a good job there. A pleasant surprise! Culture really did bring me low previously—here, most people try to stay positive and do the best they can. Having someone breathe down my neck makes me stop working out of spite.

Although there is that thing I mentioned at the start: the pay sucks. I was already very critical of capitalism as it currently is, but seeing my paycheck evaporate as soon as it comes stokes a fire in me. It sure hits different when you’re the one actually struggling. No one should have to live this way.

Perhaps there is employment out there where I can be truly fulfilled and make a living, perhaps even be comfortable. But waiting for that to happen is naive. I’ve waited long enough.

Once again: now what?

All this is driving me towards freelance design. It seems only right. I never fully went for it previously, as my cushy tech job kept me content only being design-adjacent.

If I’m going to give my best efforts and still struggle, then I might as well enjoy it. So here I go. I’m walking back my decision the long, hard, stupid way.

I’m still in the early stages. Building a portfolio, reaching out to people, improving myself as a designer. Thankfully my current job still leaves me with enough energy in the evenings. It feels good coming home to tinker, to sand and chip away at a rough design until it starts to lustre.

Even now, without any successes, I know I should have done this a lot earlier. But hey—the next best time is now, isn’t it?

Wish me luck.

Goodbye, frontend development

2024-06-14T00:00:00Z

I’ve been a frontend developer since 2011. I should have quit around maybe 2015, but only, ahem, “followed through” this year, nearly a decade later. I don’t know why I kept going (money), but it would probably help me to process this out loud on the internet. There’s been plenty of really good posts on the subject already anyway, so I’ma ride the wave.

As you may guess for someone who claims to have quit the tech industry in 2024, I was excreted by it.

A scant two years ago, it felt like my phone was ringing nonstop from recruiter calls. Now? I haven’t had a call in months. Job hunting has been hell: after jumping through all the hoops of cover letters, technical exams, and interviews, you don’t even get the kindness of a rejection email.

Withered by months of job hunting, I stare into my empty screen. Through that blotchy reflection, something that’s been in my mind’s periphery for so long came back into focus: fuck this. I’ve hated frontend development for years.

The halcyon days of ‘view source’

I was a nursing graduate, but my first job was as a frontend developer. Honestly, I really wanted to be a designer, but didn’t want to fiddle with an image editor then show mockups for someone else to build. It didn’t really feel like designing for the web to me. So: frontend. I love the web so much, man. I really just went and learned HTML/CSS/JS, lovingly stolen from everyone’s cool websites, then made a career out of it. It was such an empowering feeling. ‘View source’ being a core part of your learning felt incredible. All day I’d open up some links on a website gallery and just ‘view source’. You’d know if a website was built as a trade or a craft, as it was pretty close to the creator’s intent. Now it’s more often simply something a compiler spat out. It’s somewhat improving, but it’s more like seeing the occasional bud sprout in a razed-down forest.

It’s all JS now. Just Surrender.

I started off saying that I felt like I should have quit around 2015 or so, and would you look at that? It was the year React et al really got going.

I’ve of course (begrudgingly) learned a good amount of them, and have honestly (begrudgingly) enjoyed it at times and understand the benefits. Still, none of these frameworks’ pleasures can convince me it’s worth abandoning the core trinity of the web and letting JS take the wheel. It’s too fundamental a thing to simply pass up for me, and it just feels like prioritizing developer needs over user needs. A certain type of developer I wasn’t, anyway. I hang out with the designers more than the devs; don’t ask me about routing.

Still, I kept at it, cause the money was good, and my third-world existence couldn’t let that go. The full-stack demands of being a frontend developer kept growing and whittled away at what I loved about the work. That great love gave way to great heartbreak. I felt stretched so thin that I just came apart. Can’t I just do front-of-the-frontend?

Front-of-the-frontend, and jobless? What a surprise!!!

It’s a badge of shame at this point. The equivalent of a dunce cap or a “kick me” sign taped to your back. Saying you’re a front-of-the-frontend dev means you prefer not to work with JS, and what the hell else is the frontend nowadays but JS?

So it goes. I just want to build pretty little brochure sites, deep down (I mean, shit, even those are built in React). The equivalent of a birdhouse when everybody wants to erect skyscrapers.

Now what?

Employment doesn’t seem like the move, to be honest. I’ve sold my being to companies my whole adult life, and I don’t feel like the trades were fair. I’ve grown so cynical as to think that most forms of employment are prostitution: they’re gonna screw you one way or another. Yeah, I haven’t been okay for a good while—at least work-wise, anyway. But I digress. Perhaps a topic for another time.

If this ruins my employability, then so be it. It would keep me from abandoning everything I’ve just said if I somehow got a job offer. I can’t live that way anymore.

Here it is. Goodbye, frontend development. You were long gone as I had loved you.

Building websites as catharsis

2021-12-19T00:00:00Z

Greetings from the murky vantage of December 2021! There’s just so much going on. Here’s a cute little time capsule for you:

A pandemic nearly 3 years running
The steady rise of authoritarianism
The continuing churn of late-stage capitalism
The planet steadily coming to a boil thanks to the above
A growing movement of anti-intellectualism and willful ignorance serving to speed every other point along

Man. Zooming out to take all that in is rough, and that’s on top of everyone’s personal lives already. How am I going to explain this to my kid later on? It’s a hell of a tl;dr to make.

How have you been coping? I kind of…haven’t, really. I just stuck to work, living a day at a time, trying to keep the future out of mind. It comes regardless, though, and so we must move. We’re trying to migrate, away from where the list above is treated more like a game plan than a warning.

Reaching out from the fog, I find myself back to tinkering with my site. I’m glad I did; I felt a familiar rush, and I rode it all the way to this redesign. And so I’ve taken to just keeping at it, a totem to focus on and help keep me grounded somewhat.

As some of my web heroes have mentioned before, working on a website is a calming thing. I’ve done it for work for so long that I forgot that I used to do it for pleasure, too. I’ve long forgotten the romance of a blinking caret. To once again be tapping away late at night, then later sleep soundly thinking of nothing, is both nostalgic and nourishing.

Going forward, I hope to give this site attention more often. Not simply as self-advertisement, but as a vehicle for catharsis. Both the writing and the fidgeting have helped me tremendously. I also hope you, reading this now, could give it a shot yourself if you haven’t. Make a website to call your own, if only for the sheer novelty of it. It’s something to do while cooped up, at least.