Spots 
I want to talk about why people who spend years building digital systems eventually start dreaming about a house in the countryside, a vegetable garden, a farm, or a small restaurant. There is a strange thing I’ve been noticing more and more among people in IT.
First, you want to build a career. Then you want a good salary, interesting projects, remote work, a Senior position, then Lead, Architect, or Engineering Manager. And after a few years, you start dreaming about a house on the edge of a village. A few garden beds or a small cheese farm.
Some people start growing vegetables on a small plot of land. Some dream of opening a bakery or a restaurant. Some actually buy land and move out of the city. And I think there is much more to it than simply wanting to leave the city. After years of digital work, we start missing reality
Programmers, DevOps engineers, SREs, data engineers, analysts, and many other technical professionals spend a huge part of their lives in a world that cannot be touched.
We work with code, APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure, logs, charts, tickets, and metrics. We can spend an entire day creating something incredibly complex and then, in the evening, have this strange feeling that we didn’t actually accomplish anything important.
You wrote hundreds of lines of code, but you can’t see them as an object you can touch. You fixed production, and a few hours later, nobody is thinking about it anymore. You optimized a system, and the best result of your work is that nothing happened. The server didn’t crash. The request became faster. The infrastructure bill went down. The user simply continued using the product. We’ve learned to consider things nobody notices to be a good result. And that’s perfectly normal for good engineering. But sometimes people want a completely different feeling.
They want to walk outside in the evening and see that something real has grown during the day. Touch the soil. Pick a few cucumbers. Fix an old chair. Knead some dough. Make cheese. Build a table. And then look at it all and think: I made this with my own hands, and here it is. Not in a browser. Not in a dashboard. Not in Jira. We’re drawn to tangible results. In digital work, almost nothing ever truly ends.
There is the next release, the next bug, the next incident, the next version, the next framework, and the next technology. You have to keep learning something new, because what you knew yesterday is already becoming outdated. And so the cycle continues, an endless race.
Even when everything works, there is always another question. Can we make it faster? More reliable? Cheaper? More elegant? More secure? More scalable? Now imagine a vegetable garden.
You planted the seeds. You watered them. You waited. The first sprout appeared. Then a flower. Then a small green cucumber. A few weeks later, you picked it and put it on the table. You ate it. No next sprint. No urgent ticket. No production incident. The cucumber simply grew.
I want to talk about why people who spend years building digital systems eventually start dreaming about a house in the countryside, a vegetable garden, a farm, or a small restaurant.