# I'm back!

After more than a year, I'm back to writing. This post talks about what I went through during this time and explains why I disappeared.

- URL: https://blog.lsantos.dev/en/i-m-back/
- Published: 2026-09-11
- Category: meta
- Series: sobre-escrever
- Tags: meta, blog, news, personal
- Language: en
- Author: Lucas Santos

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I'm not sure if you noticed, but my last post on this blog was in March 2025! And it was a Backlog newsletter![^1] And now, more than a year later, I've decided it's time to come back to the blog. I've finally gotten the courage to rebuild it with a more interesting theme that isn't just a copy-paste of some generic CMS template[^2].

I decided to write this today because, first, I needed to test how the blog was working since I basically changed my entire article production pipeline. Second, because I think I owe an explanation to everyone who has read or reads this blog, and to myself as well.

Finally, it was really cool to rebuild this site in a more open way, not locked into a CMS like Ghost that I was using before. So it will be interesting to show you some of the things I've built here in other posts in this series.

But first...

## Why did I disappear?

I could make a bunch of excuses and say "life just happened" or "I got too busy." But the truth is I lost the joy of writing for a long time. Actually, I lost the desire to share content in general for a long time. One of the reasons was the pressure of always launching something new.

Because of programs like Microsoft MVP, Google Developer Expert, Docker Captains, and so on, we as participants need to report our activities throughout the year, which is fair since we were recognized to produce content and should be producing it. But for me it became a bit much. I've been part of these programs since 2017[^9], that's almost 10 years of constant content production with these reports. And I've been producing content since 2013, which is much more content before that.

I'm not saying these programs force you to produce anything. Quite the opposite, nobody says anything and nobody forces you to do anything. The problem is I forced myself to do these things like it was a religion, and it ended up taking away more than just the joy, it also took away the desire to create anything else.

It got to a point where I was searching for content to post just for the sake of posting, not because I really wanted to write the content. And that's when I realized I couldn't keep going and decided to stop until I sorted myself out. Which took much longer than expected.

During all that time I stopped completely with all content, not just writing. I stopped giving talks, making YouTube videos, literally everything. And it was a very important period for me because I discovered what I really like, and it also gave me a new perspective on what I really want to do. But more importantly than that:

==I learned to be okay with myself by producing only what I enjoy==

For a long time I thought the quantity of things I did was more important than the quality of what I made. And I punished myself a lot for not producing enough content, constantly comparing myself to other creators who were producing more, had bigger audiences. It was always a race, against myself and against everyone else as if we were all in some kind of constant competition.[^4]

All of this together caused me a very strong anxiety crisis, and that's when I realized I wasn't well enough to keep going. And that's why I decided to take a break. And that time was excellent for introspection. I could pay more attention to myself, my health, my family and friends, spend more time with my cats, and so on.

But let me expand a bit on what happened.

## What happened during that time

During all the time I was away, I had plenty of space and moments to think about what I really enjoy doing and also about what I was already doing. Plus reconciling myself a bit with the whole situation of the dreaded __artificial intelligence__[^5].

So let's go through it.

### What we think of ourselves

I'm not going to expand on AI here, but I need to say some things to give context.

When AI became more present in developers' lives and it was, in fact, a good tool that created functional and even useful things, I found myself thinking:

> [!quote] Me, when I didn't want to write anymore
> Why write about technology when you can now create anything so fast that people [don't even bother to understand it anymore](https://unix.foo/posts/last-people-who-know-how-it-works/)?

I won't say I wasn't really upset about it. After all, I always wrote about technology and I loved teaching people how to do new things with it. I also used this blog a lot as a way to remind myself of everything I learned over the years (I've always been a fan of [learning in public](https://github.lsantos.dev/my-notes)). But it made no sense (at least to me) to keep going since I or anyone could just write a prompt in Claude and have everything ready. Nobody would need to understand anything anymore.

And then something occurred to me: I defined myself as a tech guy, but I'm not just a tech guy. I can talk about infinite things.

I like to define myself as someone with serial curiosity[^8-translation-note]. It's a nice way to say I'm interested in anything, literally, from cooking[^7] to astronomy. Most of the time this is really cool because I become someone very interesting in bar conversations, but at the same time, having so many interests ends up taking a heavy toll. Especially on someone who already judges themselves as not being enough.

Because of that I turned my hobbies into work. I always said I "had to create a post" or "had to create content." But the reality is:

==We're not obligated to do absolutely anything. That obligation is imposed on us by ourselves based on others' expectations.==

And that was the main thing I realized. That I, Lucas, don't need to prove to myself or to anyone that something I'm doing is worth it or not. Actually, nobody needs to. We should just do what makes us happy regardless of what anyone else says.

Even if those things lead to absolutely nothing.

### New passions

I made a decision for this blog that from now on it will be more than a technology blog. It will be my personal space to share my opinions about all the things I've been thinking about. Whether about technology or not.

I had done this before with Backlog, where I talked about history, opinions, technology, and many other things. But this time I'm going to transform this blog into that space, as it should have been from the beginning.

To be honest, I still don't feel like talking about software development itself again. But this time away made me realize I have other passions I'd love to share with people. For example, I've always wanted to learn electronics but never had the willpower to start. But during this period I not only started learning but also started building things[^10]. I started getting more involved with music[^11]. I started understanding that technology isn't just what I worked on before, it's not just the Web. There's so much more out there.

## Moving forward

This blog, now more than ever, is worth much more. So expect diverse content about many other things here. I don't have a post schedule, and I won't have one. Posts will come out when they come out. Starting with a post already about what the new blog is capable of!

But I don't want to dwell on this now. We'll have specific posts for each of these things! I'm really excited to show everything that was built here and also to share more of what I enjoy doing.

See you later!

[^1]: Which I plan to continue! But let's take it slow!
[^2]: Which I also abandoned, by the way
[^4]: Comparison is exactly what destroys the joy of anything.
[^5]: That part in itself deserves a separate post, so I won't go into details here. For now I'll use this post just to talk about myself
[^7]: Everyone had their bread-making period during the pandemic. Mine just happened much later
[^8-translation-note]: In Portuguese this term is much less catchy: _"curiosidade em série"_
[^9]: Unfortunately I had to leave the GDE program in 2025 precisely because of this little "burnout" I had
[^10]: Which also gave me a completely different perspective on how we can use AI in a better way
[^11]: Electronics and music have a very close relationship, especially when we're talking about electric instruments. In fact, one of my great current passions is building guitar effect pedals