Dreams

Like many people in tech, I’ve been fascinated by startups for a long time. I have a soul of an explorer. Tech startups always appeared like the perfect vehicle for combining my love of programming with my dislike of rigid structures. In startups, you can be both rebellious and productive at the same time. And if you are lucky, the end result of your creative troublemaking is advancing the world by a tiny bit.

In July 2012, I’ve joined Typesafe to work on Scala — the programming language I had fallen in love with three years earlier. My decision to join was a no-brainer. The company was young, needed help with developing Scala and I really liked the people who were already working at Typesafe. From my point of view, I’ve got an offer to be paid well for something I was doing before just for fun. I also got promised I’ll move to San Francisco and help to grow the Scala team there. I remember the overwhelming feeling of winning my life. It was great.

SF was and still is one of my favourite cities in the world and it’s the center of tech. If you are into fashion you might want to live in Milan, Paris or New York. If you are into programming the choice is simpler: you want to live in quirky San Francisco. I moved to Typesafe’s San Francisco office in October 2012, just three months after joining the company. I was ecstatic about the speed at which my life was improving. I wasn’t aware that at the same speed I was developing excessive amounts of overconfidence.

There was only one thing I could do that would distract me from work: sports. I absolutely loved sports. They were a great complement to my long hours spent in front of a computer. Sports helped me stay healthy and feeling fresh. Out of my sports I tried, I liked skiing a lot. During the 2012/2013 winter I was very busy with work so I had time to go skiing just for one weekend.

On March 10th 2013, I was at slopes of Tahoe in California. During the night before I’ve got food poisoning. In the morning, I barely dragged myself out of bed. I knew it’s the only weekend I’d ski this season so I forced myself to put on skis and get on a slope. During the second ride down an easy slope, I started feeling really dizzy. I lost control of my skis, I tumbled and I crashed into a big sequoia located at the edge of the slope. My overconfidence found its way out.

The accident was nearly fatal. After being airlifted to the hospital and spending hours in MRI, an assessment was ready. I learnt about it only the next day because I was to weak to be awaken. Doctors explained that I broke both of my wrists, I broke my jaw in four places and I fractured a base of my skull. It was a combination of a miracle and me wearing a helmet that saved me from having a fatal brain damage.

Fast forward two years later, I’m still recovering. After moving back to Europe, I had a knee surgery and a wrist surgery. The injuries I have are difficult to treat so I ended up visiting the hospital over 160 times. I had to visit a dentist over 40 times. I’ve spent my last two years dealing with gruelling recovery. Like anybody going through such a difficult process, I had my ups and downs.

Overall, I’ve made a great progress on the recovery. I have vivid memories from the spring of last year when I could barely walk for two months even on flat surfaces. I still remember the first six months after knee surgery when I wasn’t allowed to bend my knee and walking on stairs was very slow and frightening. During that time, I started to appreciate conveniences for disabled people in cities’ design. It’s interesting how your perception of city changes when your body is not fully capable of moving around. It’s an awakening experience that helped me understand the meaning of empathy.

In February this year, over a year after my knee surgery, I went skiing again. This time in Italy. It was a very scary moment the first time I put my skis on. I wasn’t sure how my knee is going to feel. More importantly, I was simply afraid of skiing. I’ve put countless hours into physical therapy but it paid off. My body handled skiing better than my mind did. However, after a while my mind caught up and I started enjoying my time on a slope. My week in Italy was a big success. I still marvel at how much progress one can make given seemingly hopeless starting point.

While laying in hospital bed the day after my accident I’ve made a resolution: I would do everything humanly possible to not get defeated and return to doing sports. That was my new big dream. I believe this is what kept me going for the last two years. I just love sports so much.

Although, I’ve made a big progress I’m not done with my recovery just yet. My physical condition is still rather fragile. There are weeks when I would feel good and some others when I would feeling like I had regressed for half a year of my recovery. For the last leg of my journey, I feel like I’ll need a special kind of dedication and precision. I decided to focus on my recovery full-time and quit my job as a result.

Quitting Typesafe didn’t come about easy for me. I liked my team of exceptionally good software engineers and fine fellows. I had fun working on Scala, and over time I started to appreciate the fact that my work had bigger meaning than me just having fun. Still, I think focusing on my health is the right thing to do. I’d like to thank everybody from Typesafe for all their support & help and the great work we’ve done together.

To be honest with myself about focusing full-time on my recovery, I came to the conclusion that I should quit programming completely. I want to spend my time doing sports, eating healthy and being very precise about my exercises. I like the tech world so much that I’m sure that if I had stayed around, it would distract me a great deal. Leaving tech means, I’ll be leaving Scala community too.

Before I stop doing anything programming-related I thought I’d publish some of my blog posts that has been sitting Drafts folder for too long. I’ll blog about Scala and programming. I think I’ll do this for a month or so.

Focusing on my physical therapy full-time, with all the dedication I can give to it is an experiment. I want to find out how far one can push limits of his/her recovery. I’m in a very fortunate position that I can afford not working and focusing on my health. I’ve been lucky to meet excellent doctors and physical therapists that made my painful visits feel almost fun. As a way of giving back, I plan to share some of my lessons learnt from my experience.

My big, seemingly impossible dream is to be able to go on one of those 150km bike rides I used to do before my accident. I have this beautiful bike waiting for me already.