In December 2025 I wrote about my retirement from live streaming, which was once a valuable and very enjoyable part of my career in developer relations (DevRel). Since closing that chapter I have redesigned my website, launched a new side project, released some new music, and made a lot of space to reflect on the last five and a half years I’ve spent in DevRel and ultimately, my place in the technology industry.

I recently spruced up my garden with a bird-feeding station and it has been an absolute joy to sit and watch nature at every opportunity. As I observe the wood pigeons, collared doves, gold crests, house sparrows, robins and a family of squirrels coexist peacefully and peck the seeds and munch on the nuts (even if the squirrels do often steal the bird food) I become painfully aware of how I’ve lived so much of my life on The Internet in the last six years. I also reflect on how much has changed in the technology industry throughout that time, how much negativity and weird stuff I am forced to consume every day as a result, and how much I yearn to be as carefree and alive as the nature that I love so much to sit and witness.

Before working in DevRel I was a tech lead for a small creative agency in Manchester, UK. At the time I was frustrated with how much of my time was taken up with meetings, presentations, sprint and stakeholder management, and how little time I had to dedicate to building and working on my craft as a front-end developer. As a self-taught engineer who worked incredibly hard to pivot from teaching music to a successful tech career, I moved to DevRel in 2021, which promised to give me the time and space to continue to hone my craft. At the time, this small niche of the tech industry offered me the opportunity to explore, learn and build through teaching. I couldn't believe what a perfect combination of my skills this type of job was at the time. It felt too good to be true, honestly.

The good parts of DevRel are really good. Throughout the years I’ve had the privilege of helping many people succeed through my teaching, mentoring and support, and at the same time, I’ve been able to build some fun projects and learn about The Web along the way. I even picked up some half-decent video editing skills. Through the opportunity to travel and speak at conferences, I’ve made some truly wonderful friends scattered around the world, who all come from different backgrounds and cultures, brought together through their shared love and passion for technology (or at least, what it used to be). As I reflect on the last five and a half years, I’ve found myself at the heart of a thriving network of technologists who all have each other’s back. And I will be eternally grateful for that.

Unfortunately, for me, the difficult parts have outweighed the good.

The approaches to effective DevRel can vary wildly depending on the individuals that make up a team and the company itself, but ultimately, the primary goal of a DevRel team is to inspire and educate a community to encourage product adoption, and to help users achieve meaningful outcomes with that product in as short a time as possible. Unfortunately, the nuances within this clear remit are often at odds with what business leaders require in terms of being able to measure success.

Developer education in the community is a long game. Product adoption by the right audience takes time, patience, and an experimental approach. But very often, this does not satisfy those in leadership positions, as they want to see measurable success in the short-term. I get it, I really do. However, it is notoriously difficult to measure the short-term impact and success of DevRel unless you use somewhat arbitrary metrics. These could be sign-ups (that might not end up being activated), blog post views or video stats in order just to have something to measure and report on.

The issue with this is that you can measure anything, and you'll naturally optimise for making that line go up, regardless of whether it's the right approach for the product or the customers or the team. For example, you could write a click-bait blog post and reach the front page of Hacker News. You could make a silly YouTube short that gets 15k views. Congrats, you demonstrated success! But it's most likely the "wrong" success, as those little Internet escapades most probably won't convert to impactful product adoption and paying customers. What's more, all of this distracts and diverts the efforts of DevRel teams from real impactful work that shows meaningful results in the long term.

Like many others in the industry, I have tried to find ways to show how DevRel and education is more than content creation, arbitrary metrics and making the line go up. But my detailed article Defining Paths to Business Value in Developer Relations, in retrospect, feels like a bit of a cry for help in trying to justify the profession to people who have already decided that regardless, they need those meaningless results in the short term in order to appease the shareholders.

Given DevRel is a long game, with the only way to measure short-term successes through entirely arbitrary metrics, businesses who are struggling to grow in this reckless economy often find financial investment into DevRel very difficult to justify. Even as this niche of the tech industry was seemingly thriving in the digital post-pandemic pre-AI era of 2021-2023, my day-to-day work was always accompanied by an ominous, low-level, yet all-encompassing feeling of anxiety centred on the premise that if I cannot demonstrate short-term financial success for the company, then I could lose my job at a moment's notice and be without a way to support my family. In fact, I was made redundant in 2023 from a DevRel role at a company that was moving away from a community-centred approach to an enterprise-based strategy at the time. On reflection, what most notably contributed to the feelings of anxiety was that my job and responsibilities were being heavily micromanaged by those that did not understand or respect DevRel as a discipline. This came as a direct result of the lack of immediate measurable metrics that convert to financial gains, which often tends to send leadership into a flailing panic of pivots which leave a wake of destruction in their path.

As a result, I have — all too often — overworked myself in a desperate attempt to justify my existence, demonstrate my value and impact, and keep my job. This has, more than once, caused me to suffer from health problems including joint and nerve pain, despite being "completely healthy" according to numerous tests. At its worst at the start of 2025, I couldn’t even use my hands due to the pain for work or anything else, and I had to learn how to code with my voice. Unfortunately, I’ve been suffering from wrist pain and unexplained ailments again since December 2025. It's becoming quite embarrassing how frequently I visit the doctors only to realise that I am, once again, suffering from work-related stress and anxiety that manifests in my physical body.

It’s worth mentioning that in my latest role, my education work was definitely respected and understood, but by the end of my tenure, it had become difficult to justify. Given the shift in the technology industry that has changed how people learn and seek information (more on this later), it was difficult to find the right captive audience for my content through the more traditional methods that worked well in the past. I know my work was excellent, but I also feel like I failed. And for someone who takes pride in their work and wants to do well, this was a heavy burden for me.

When you work in DevRel, you are a public company representative. As such, your online presence (because you are expected to be online, and present) is tied inextricably to the perception of a company. If you struggle with any of the above issues mentioned, you must seek solace in the deep, dark shadows of group chats and backchannels. It’s comforting, in a way, that many of my peers also feel this way, but alas it is destroying us slowly, one by one. And whilst you share your anxiety and worries with your peers in the dark, you must continue to remain outwardly positive and sparky and cheerful on The Internet as a company representative whilst you’re crying and screaming and throwing up on the inside because you spend all day, every day, trying to prove your worth to keep your job.

It’s exhausting to have to always play a character. As a result, I’ve spent pretty much all of my developer relations career in a constant state of burnout.

Over the years, I also started to feel trapped inside my own “online technical educator” whitep4nth3r persona, and for every time I have summoned the courage to write or talk about a controversial topic that affects us all, there have been many more things that I have been unable to say. In fact, one of the reasons I started my weird newsletter was to give me a way to share the things on my mind that were difficult to say as whitep4nth3r, albeit rather cryptically.

These feelings of instability, anxiety and unease are even more pervasive now in 2026, as the way people learn and explore technology has changed significantly since the mass-adoption of generative AI tools. Google has declared war on the web. People aren’t seeking information in the ways we once knew; The Internet and its communities have fragmented. It is now more and more difficult to use search engines to actually search for real and accurate information as a result of imposing AI overviews and the swathes of new AI slop articles that are poor regurgitations of stolen content that have been eating themselves for quite some time.

Additionally, developers aren’t gathering together in online spaces to learn and teach and share exciting projects anymore, rather they are mindlessly scrolling for a much-needed hit of short-form content dopamine (because the horrors of the world are more persistent than ever). And, as I mentioned in a recent blog post, many developers have replaced authentic human collaboration with conversations with the dreaded Chat Bots. A friend who is a very talented developer educator has come to the same conclusions:

The entire vibe has shifted. The majority of [community] folks are still on Twitter but there’s so much AI grifting and misery and hate in that place. LinkedIn is a parody of itself at this point. Bluesky feels reasonably cosy but way too much of a bubble. The community isn’t there. The forums are dead, the new Discord is quiet.

Freelance educators are also being impacted by this shift. Josh W. Comeau, author of incredible industry-defining courses like Whimsical Animations, recently shared on Bluesky that he has doubts about how sustainable his business model is:

I just launched my third course, Whimsical Animations, and so far, it’s on track to sell roughly ⅓ as many copies as a typical course launch. It’s a similar story with my two existing courses. Sales are down significantly from last year.

There are likely a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest is AI. There’s sort of a double whammy with AI:

1. Many people are wondering whether developer jobs will even exist in a few months, so they’re reluctant to spend time/money learning new dev skills.

2. Even if they do want to learn new dev skills, LLMs can provide personalized tutoring, so there’s less incentive to buy a paid course.

The future feels bleak for educators. Rich curriculums we craft intentionally and carefully for real human audiences are now routinely stolen and regurgitated by predictive algorithms. The Chat Bots, with their sycophantic tone of voice, are deliberately engineered to erase our own personalities, hard work and craft entirely from the equation. If DevRel is to survive, I think it will need to look entirely different from how it functioned during the last ten years.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that my experience, skills, empathy and teaching expertise no longer hold the value they once did in this volatile industry (if they ever really did?). And this only exacerbates the burnout and anxiety that so often consumes me.

I am leaving developer relations and I am going offline.

I wondered for a while whether I should leave tech entirely. But I still really, really enjoy making websites. I’ve found an exciting new role as a Staff Engineer, and I can’t wait to get stuck in. I’ve taken great joy in tearing down my video production studio to create a zen little coding den in which to explore my new role, and I can’t wait to never have to wear makeup ever again to do my job. (I mean, I didn’t really have to wear makeup, but I also kind of did. If you know, you know.) To protect my mental health and decouple my online presence from a company brand (at last!), I will not be announcing this new role publicly in the ways this weird industry has become accustomed to. Although, if you’re a close friend, you know where I’m going and that I’m happy and I trust you. I’ve deactivated my LinkedIn profile, and I’m going dark on Bluesky.

This is not a decision I have taken lightly, and it’s probably been in the works in my subconscious for a couple of years now. I’ve taken a lower salary, and outwardly it may look like I’ve gone “backwards” in my career, but I know this is right for me, right now. After all, progress is not always linear, and I see this as the first step towards the life I have been craving whilst sitting and watching nature in my beautiful garden. One day I’d like to follow in Chad Whitacre’s footsteps (please read his letter), and leave this place for good. But that’s a little while off yet; I have some more things to do here first.

As for what the future holds for whitep4nth3r, I’m actually not sure. I know I’m not that important in this vast and strange ever-evolving world; I know this won’t affect many people in the grand scheme of things, but I’m sure some of you will be wondering if I’ll still be around. I’d love to continue sharing what I’ve learned about The Web and technology on my blog, but given the current state of the search engine industry, would anyone even see it? (I have an RSS feed, for what it's worth.) I’ll probably continue to send my weekly newsletter, but the format may change given I am Logging Off for good and won’t be scouring The Internet for weird links anymore.

After all these years I can finally say out loud: I do not want to be the face of a company. I do not want to speak at conferences or on podcasts or do workshops in order to try and sell you a product. I do not want my value determined by arbitrary gamified metrics like how many video views or blog post views or company sign-ups I generate in a landscape that is completely out of my control. I do not want to be perceived. For being perceived is breaking me, and I need to put myself back together.

I just want to exist. I want to be closer to nature and my loved ones. I want to be present in the now. I want to be free. I want to make music. I want to live.

And I just want to build good websites.