Around the summer of 2024 I thought to myself “If I have to write another REST API around another set of relational database tables I think I’ll go insane”.

Of course now the tedium of writing the same sorts of code over and over has been replaced with the agentic AI revolution. But back then that wasn’t yet the case.

And so I went out in search of something else to do. I’ll spare you the details but I fell with my nose in the butter, as the Dutch say. I landed a job working for the Dutch National Police Intelligence. I can’t say much about what I do (… takes off shades like that dude from CSI and looks off into far distance). But I can say that I’m a big data engineer.

I am a plumber. I work with moving shit from A to B. As cleanly, quickly, efficiently, quietly and beautifully as possible. Except instead of literal shit I move data (and am paid slightly less).

And I love it.

I love that I have no frontend. My brother is a frontender and my wife is an ex UX/UI designer and I love them both dearly and have the utmost respect for those professions. But for me, purely personally, F CSS and pixels and alignment and webforms and whatever the hell happens to TypeScript projects to get it to run in a browser and flexbox and the yippy-kayay-mutha!@# cowboy wildwest that is the world of frontend frameworks. Don’t get me wrong I’m a stone cold full stack mercenary detachering pro, I will frontend if I have to and I won’t complain about it (much). I even once coded a custom infinite scroll calendar from scratch in Angular and RxJS and it was one of the happiest three weeks of my professional career. But generally I avoid the frontend if I can.

And to be honest, and I know I shouldn’t really say this, but I’m also kinda glad to be rid of those pesky end-users. Now I have beautiful lovely consistent applications as my users. I build software for software, safely cocooned in a world of data pipelines, like Neo before he took that pill … but I’m actually happy in my pod.

I love that a tiny little function I write may be executed dozens of millions of times in a single application run. And so I need to think veeeeery carefully about what I do and making just a teeny tiny improvement can cause massive profits.

Now the AI revolution is here I wouldn’t mind revisiting the world of Enterprise Web Application development since it finally has something new and challenging to offer me. But for now, I’m very happy where I am.