Reigniting the Spark: What Community Taught Me That Code Never Could

I tried new frameworks, new languages, even a new career path. The fix turned out to be a beer after a meetup.

The first time I wrote a Hello World program, something clicked inside me. A spark. That feeling that said: this is it, this is what I want to do with my life. It carried me through university, through my first jobs, through years of building software.

In 2021, that spark was almost dead.

On paper, everything was perfect. I was a senior developer at a Belgian consultancy company. My technical skills were appreciated. My projects were solid, with no crunch time or unreachable deadlines. Pay was good. Stability was great.

But every morning, I'd open my editor and feel... nothing. Not frustration, not dread. Just a flat, hollow emptiness. I could still write the code. I could still solve the problems. But the fire behind it had gone out, and I didn't know why.

I went to colleagues. I went to HR. The answer was always the same: "That's probably burnout." And for a while, I believed them. But something didn't fit. Burnout is a fire consuming itself. Too much pressure, too much load. That wasn't me. My spark had simply gone cold. There was nothing left to burn.

There's a name for this: apathy. It's different from burnout in a way that matters. It's not that you have too much to do. It's that nothing you do feels like it means anything anymore.

Our brains build what psychologists call a self-narrative, a story stitched together from our past, present, and imagined future that tells us who we are and where we're going. My self-narrative said "passionate developer." My reality said "going through the motions."

If I put it in developer terms, it was like having a pull request with nothing but merge conflicts, and I couldn't resolve a single one. So my brain did what any overwhelmed system does: it shut down. Put up the blast shields. Stopped feeling anything at all.

The Bug I Couldn't Fix

I'm a software engineer. When there's a problem, I fix it. So naturally, I treated this like a bug.

First attempt: maybe the framework was the issue. I'd been doing a lot of Spring Boot, so I tried Quarkus. I genuinely like Quarkus, but it didn't fix this.

Second attempt: go deeper. I tried Kotlin. I tried TypeScript. I even crossed enemy lines and tried C#. So next time someone tells you C# will solve all your problems, I can personally attest: it's not true.

When the languages didn't work, I went deeper still. Maybe it wasn't the tools. Maybe it was the job itself. Maybe I should stop being a developer and move into project management, Scrum, Agile. Thankfully, my brain intervened: No. You know you don't like project management. Please stop.

I was running out of levels to debug. I thought about leaving my company. I thought about leaving software engineering entirely. And right around that time, I remembered something a colleague once said while fighting a particularly nasty bug: "If I can't fix this, I'm going to leave everything, go to Patagonia, and live with llamas."

That was almost exactly how I felt. Funny enough, if you look around today, we are all living with llamas. They're just LLMs.

The Impulse That Changed Everything

For reasons I still can't explain, I got the impulse to try public speaking. If you consider the state I was in (apathetic, questioning my entire career), it seems like the last thing you'd do. But I started writing abstracts, submitting to CFPs, and after a while, I got accepted to Voxxed Days Brussels. I was happy for about five minutes. Then I realized I actually had to stand up in front of an audience and give a talk. I got really, really stressed.

And then, while doom scrolling on social media the way we all do, I stumbled across a speaker training session. I thought, maybe I can get some tips to calm my nerves. Then I noticed it was organized by the Belgian Java User Group. I'm a co-organizer of that group today, but at the time? I knew vaguely what a Java User Group was. I had never attended a single meetup. And honestly, I didn't care that much.

But I went. I gave a short practice talk. I got feedback. Most of that feedback, I don't remember.

What I remember is the people.

That's where everything shifted. After the meetup, we went for a beer. I'm from Belgium, what did you expect? Kevin was there. Tom, who's the JUG leader. Ronald from JobRunr. And sitting there, in that completely ordinary pub, I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. Energy. Warmth. Something I'd been missing without knowing I was missing it.

Something in that moment told me: there's hope after all.

Drawing My Way In

The Belgian Java User Group runs like an open source project. There's a GitHub repository, and every meetup is an issue. During that first meetup, Tom said: "If you want to contribute, come on in. We're open." I figured I'd give it a try.

I found an issue: the group needed a new logo. The old one was a coffee grinder, not exactly the most evocative image for a developer community. I happen to like drawing. So I drew a new logo for the BeJUG.

It was a tiny contribution. I wasn't writing code. I wasn't giving a keynote. I was just doing something small with a skill I had. But it was received with such warmth and kindness that I thought: okay, let me try one more step.

So I helped organize a meetup at my company. That went well too. And from those two small steps, I started contributing more and more: attending events, helping with logistics, eventually becoming a co-organizer. Across all those meetups and events, what I remember most is not the technical content. It's the conversations. The connections. The stories behind the code.

Without really noticing it, that small fire that was almost dead started growing again. I have never been as passionate about software engineering as I am today.

But I'm still a software engineer. I didn't change careers. I didn't change companies. So what actually changed?

Why Connection Hits Harder Than Code

I wanted to understand why it worked. Why did going to a JUG bring back what years of trying new technologies couldn't? So I dug into the research. What I found reframed everything.

Your brain on connection. Two chemicals matter here. Dopamine is the reward molecule. Social media companies have spent billions learning to hijack it. Every time you solve a bug, win a game, or get a notification, you get a dopamine hit.

Oxytocin is the bonding molecule. Every time you genuinely connect with someone, your brain releases it. New mothers produce it in huge quantities to bond with their babies.

For a long time, scientists thought these two were like neighbors who wave politely and never talk. But recent research revealed that dopamine and oxytocin actually work together in the reward center of your brain. The practical implication: if you solve a problem alone, you get a dopamine rush. Call it a five out of ten. Solve the same problem with someone, and the oxytocin combines with the dopamine to make it a ten.

That's what was happening in those post-meetup conversations. My reward system was being rekindled, not by a new framework, but by people.

Passion is neurologically contagious. Mirror neurons are brain cells that fire not only when you perform an action, but when you watch someone else do it. The "monkey see, monkey do" circuitry. But they don't just mirror actions. They mirror emotions.

When you see a speaker who is genuinely passionate, your brain mirrors that passion as if it were your own. That's why you walk out of a great conference talk wanting to try everything the speaker mentioned. It's not just inspiration. It's neurology. Being around passionate people at those meetups was literally rewiring my emotional relationship with code.

The missing third. Psychology has a framework called Self-Determination Theory that identifies three pillars of intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

During my apathy phase, I had autonomy. I could make my own technical decisions. I had competence. It was in the job title. Two out of three. Like a student, I figured that was a passing grade.

It's not. It really isn't.

The missing pillar was relatedness: the ability to connect with others, to feel part of something larger than yourself. When I drew that logo, organized that meetup, stayed for those beers, I was finally feeding the need my brain had been starving for. Research confirms this: when developers help colleagues, they experience higher levels of both competence and relatedness. Helping someone fills two of your three fundamental needs at once.

But relatedness doesn't just happen because you're in the same room as other people. It takes deliberate action. Looking back, three things made the difference for me.

Active listening. Not waiting for your turn to talk. Actually hearing someone. When a fellow developer explains a problem they're stuck on and you give them your full attention, no glancing at your phone, no mentally composing your answer before they finish, something shifts. They feel seen, and you feel connected. It sounds simple, but in a world of half-read Slack messages and multitasked video calls, genuinely listening has become a rare gift.

Collective contribution. Drawing that logo wasn't just about the logo. It was about adding my piece to something we were building together. When you contribute to a shared goal, organizing a meetup, maintaining a community repo, even just helping set up chairs before a talk, you stop being an audience member and become part of the story. That shift from consumer to contributor is where relatedness really takes root.

Sharing vulnerability. This one is the hardest. Saying "I don't know" or "I'm struggling" in a room full of developers feels risky. But every time someone at a meetup shared a failure, a doubt, or a lesson learned the hard way, it gave everyone else permission to be human too. Vulnerability is the shortcut to trust, and trust is the foundation relatedness is built on.

This is also why mentoring hits differently inside a community. Before the JUG, I was already reviewing pull requests, helping less experienced developers. It was "part of my job." I did it dutifully, without understanding its real impact. But now that you know about dopamine and oxytocin working together, it makes sense: when you help someone achieve something and you see them light up, your brain registers their success as partly your own. Helping looks selfless, but your brain reaps the full reward. As Gandhi put it: "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

Much like my four-year-old daughter, junior developers ask the questions you've stopped asking. They're not formatted by years of assumptions. They can challenge you in ways that make you bigger, precisely because they don't know the "right" way yet. And we forget that the knowledge we carry isn't natural. We spent years acquiring it. We can pass it on.

The Happiness That Doesn't Fade

There's a distinction in psychology that changed how I think about my career: hedonic versus eudaimonic happiness.

Hedonic happiness is pleasure: a new car, a great holiday, a salary increase, that rush of learning a shiny new technology. It feels fantastic. But your brain adapts. The first big raise thrills you. The second is nice. The third barely registers.

This is called hedonic adaptation, and social media accelerates it ruthlessly. You keep chasing the next hit, and each one satisfies you less.

Push it far enough and you feel nothing at all. Apathetic, because you're so used to the rush that ordinary things don't register anymore. That's exactly what had happened to me. My career had all the hedonic markers (good pay, interesting tech, stability) but the meaning had drained out, and no amount of new frameworks could refill it.

Eudaimonic happiness is different. It comes from meaning, purpose, growth, and contribution. It doesn't fade the same way. Try going to your boss and saying "I need more meaning in my work." They'll look at you like you've lost your mind. You can't buy meaning. You can't be assigned meaning. But you can find it, and it's more durable than any pleasure.

Here's the stat that stopped me: if just 20% of your time is spent on work you find meaningful, your risk of burnout drops by 50%. Twenty percent. That's one day a week, or two hours a day. You don't need to overhaul your entire career. You need a meaningful corner of it.

Community gave me that corner. Conferences, meetups, mentoring, organizing. None of this replaced my day job. It complemented it. And the meaning I found in those hours became a buffer against everything else. The tedious meetings, the pull requests I didn't want to review, the parts of the job that will never be exciting. The meaningful 20% gave me fuel.

What They're Trying to Steal

We're at a strange point in our industry. The shift to remote work gave us flexibility but also isolation. Many of us code alone in our homes, seeing colleagues only through screens. And I'm not saying we should all go back to the office. That's not my point. But because we connect less naturally, we need to be more deliberate about connecting.

Then there's AI. When you open ChatGPT or Claude or any LLM and ask a question, something subtle happens. It gives you an answer, and then it asks: Can I help you with anything else? It's warm. It's available. It never judges you. Without you realizing it, it's trying to replace the human connection you'd normally get by walking over to a colleague and saying, "Hey, can you look at this with me?"

Social networks are built to capture your dopamine. LLMs are starting to do the same with your oxytocin.

The two neurochemicals that together produce the deepest sense of reward and belonging your brain can generate, both targeted by systems designed to keep you engaged with screens instead of people. I'm not saying stop using them. I use them. But we need to be conscious of what we're trading away when we choose the machine over the human sitting next to us.

The Rejection Post

At a conference last year, another speaker came up to me and said: "You go to so many conferences, you must have an amazing acceptance rate." I pulled out my phone, opened Sessionize, and showed him every conference I'd submitted to alongside the ones that actually accepted me. His eyes widened. It wasn't that I had a high rate. I just submitted to a lot.

A few months later, I got rejected from JFokus. The email was kind. Too many submissions, hard choices. It happens. But it stings.

I decided to post about it publicly. Not to complain, just to say: I got rejected, it's okay, it happens to everyone. I thought maybe a few people would react. What actually happened stunned me. Speaker after speaker reached out: "Thank you for saying that. We feel terrible when we get rejected, and when we see experienced speakers at all these conferences, we assume they never get turned down."

We never share the rejections. Only the acceptances. That curated highlight reel feeds imposter syndrome across our entire community. I have colleagues who say "I want to speak at conferences, but I have nothing to tell anybody." They're wrong, but they'll never believe that if the only stories they see are success stories.

Imposter syndrome doesn't just stop people from speaking. It stops communities from forming.

I saw this firsthand at my own company. We tried to build an internal tech exploration group, developers sharing knowledge about what's coming next. It had real energy at first. Then management said: "I need results by this date." Suddenly everyone was focused on the deadline, not on each other. The community never had time to form. It collapsed, and management called it a waste of time.

They had killed the psychological safety before the community could take root. Without safety, cortisol floods your system. Your brain locks the doors. You can't connect with anyone. You're in fight-or-flight mode. No community can form in that state.

That's why the beer after the meetup matters as much as the talks. That's why vulnerability matters. That's why posting about rejection matters. It creates the safe space where real connection becomes possible.

How to Start

If any of this resonates, if you recognize that quiet emptiness, that feeling of going through the motions, here is what I'd tell you.

Find a community. A local user group, a meetup, an open source project. It doesn't have to be a Java User Group. It has to be a group of people who care about something you care about.

Show up more than once. Belonging isn't built in a single evening. Go consistently. Each time, you know more faces, and the conversations go deeper.

Contribute something small. Don't wait until you feel ready. I drew a logo. You might answer a question, help set up chairs, write a blog post about something you learned. Small contributions open paths you couldn't see from the outside.

Give feedback to speakers. Every speaker has poured hours into their prep. Leave honest feedback: what you liked, what you'd change. It costs you two minutes and gives them something invaluable.

Give before you expect to get. When you give to a community without keeping score, what returns is almost always more than what you put in. Just not in the way you'd expect.

The Fire That Came Back

I started this story with a spark that went out. A career that looked perfect on the outside and felt hollow on the inside. I tried every technical fix I could think of, and none of them worked. Because I was trying to solve a human problem with technical solutions.

What brought me back was people. Kevin, Tom, Ronald, and dozens of others whose names fill up my story now. A beer after a meetup. A logo I drew. A talk I was terrified to give. Small, human moments that my brain was literally wired to respond to.

The spark was never really gone. It was just waiting for the right fuel.

And the fuel was never code. It was connection.

Your local user group is meeting this month. Go.

This article draws on research from neuroscience and psychology, including: the interplay of oxytocin and dopamine in social behavior (ScienceDirect, 2024), Self-Determination Theory applied to developers (DPE Summit, 2024), the protective effect of purpose against burnout (Apt Research, 2024), the distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being (Journal of Happiness Studies, 2024), and research on psychological safety in tech teams (InfoQ, 2024).