From Building from Scratch in Azure to Feeling Like Legacy

My first job was on a team with a lot of closeness and trust. Direct meetings, shared decisions. We built services from scratch on Azure.

I learned a ton. Integrations, diagrams, tests. But what marked me most was how much they valued my work. How I prepared diagrams, they loved the visual side. And they didn't just notice — my teammates asked me to show them how I did it. That validation, as a junior, was huge even though it was just a visual aspect.

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Then I got moved to localization work. Legacy code. And on top of that, I was coming back from 17 weeks of parental leave. The disconnection was total. Suddenly, I felt like legacy too. Everything I had built seemed not to matter in this new context.

I have more product vision than before. More experience. But the current context doesn't let me show it. And I start to doubt: do I really know as much as I thought?

I haven't lost ability. I've changed context. But that feeling is hard to shake.

I've lost a lot of the excitement I had for programming. And the AI tsunami doesn't help either. But I'm writing this as an act of faith: I hope to recover soon. Because I know what it feels like when things click —when your work is recognized— and I want to feel that again.