When You Miss Writing Code

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a particular kind of melancholy that hits engineering managers around the six-month mark. You’re in your fourth meeting of the day, you’ve just spent an hour on a spreadsheet, and you glance over at your team, heads down, headphones on, deep in the flow state you remember so well. And you think: I miss that.

I still feel it. After all these years, there are days when I’d trade every meeting on my calendar for four uninterrupted hours with a codebase and a problem to solve. The feeling doesn’t go away. But understanding it, what it actually is, and what to do with it, makes it manageable.

Coding on guy@secdev.uk

When You Miss Writing Code