Friday night, and I don't know if this is enough

The sprint tickets are merged, mid-sem exams are done, and for the first time in weeks I have nothing due tomorrow. I should feel relieved. Instead I feel a little sick, because the second I stop moving, the question shows up: Am I doing the right thing? Will it actually get me somewhere? Do I need to be doing more? Is what I'm doing right now enough?

I'll turn 20 this Christmas. I'm in my second year of Software Engineering at Curtin Colombo, and I've been coding, in some form, since COVID lockdown boredom turned into Photoshop and Illustrator, then Adobe XD, then HTML/CSS/JS games and landing pages nobody saw, then React, then Next.js, with a Gatsby detour and a styling journey from plain CSS to SCSS to Bootstrap to Tailwind. Somewhere in there I did CS50X and then CS50P, and my portfolio site has been rebuilt in almost every framework I've touched. It's the one project that's never actually "done."

When I got A*A*AB at A-Levels, good enough for basically any STEM degree, I picked Software Engineering anyway, a year or two after ChatGPT made everyone nervous back in 2022 about whether coding jobs would even exist. People told me it was a bad time to bet on this. I did it anyway because it was the thing I actually wanted, not because it was the safe or obvious choice, which, looking back, is either the best decision I've made or the one I'll be second-guessing for years. I genuinely don't know which yet.

First year went well: 82% average, Vice Chancellor's List, Dean's List, and it helped land me my first internship at a fast-paced, VC-backed SaaS startup right at the end of first year. Three of us interns shipped an internal health-monitoring dashboard in about four months. React frontend, Node/Fastify backend, fully serverless on AWS: Lambda, RDS, API Gateway, EventBridge, all of it new to us. We spent something like 70% of the time just planning. It was a good first taste of real engineering. But working in an early-stage venture environment also showed me how the pressure to move fast can tempt teams to lean on AI shortcuts to minimize engineering spend, sometimes at the expense of code quality and architectural depth. That realization—seeing firsthand how different business pressures shape technical trade-offs—mattered even more to me than the internship itself.

I took a semester off from internships after that and didn't slow down. Built my own personal finance tracker, got Zeyvest, a CSE stock portfolio tracker, to a production-ready state, went to whatever I could: AWS cloud club events, Google DevFest, a Cursor meetup, CIMA entrepreneurship talks, visits to WSO2 and Rootcode. All of it pulling me further into wanting to actually build a career here, in this field.

Then this June I transitioned into a large enterprise tech environment—handling large-scale systems across cloud, cyber, and DevOps, where I'm working until December. I got put on a team, given simple frontend work first, then a project setup and documentation task, then backend work, and I improved fast. When organizational shifts and team reallocations unexpectedly reduced the mentorship safety net I had counted on, it was intimidating. But it also eliminated any excuse to lean on AI for architectural decisions I hadn't actually understood yet. I had to learn the execution path end to end because ownership was squarely on my shoulders. From there it was daily standups, Jira bug fixes, building a full microservice for a data pipeline, and now I'm effectively carrying a large chunk of the backend and frontend on that project plus contributing to a separate backend migration. I didn't plan to end up holding this much this early. I just didn't want to be the reason something broke, or the engineer who let the system decide what to do without understanding it.

And now it's Friday night and I'm somehow more anxious in the quiet than I was in the middle of all of it. Part of it is the AI question. Everyone around me, myself included, is trying to figure out what happens to "software engineering" over the next five years. For weeks I caught myself buying into the panic—telling myself I needed to abandon ship and rebrand as an "AI engineer" overnight, like there was some rapidly closing window. But the closer I look at it, the more that sounds like panic talking rather than real engineering.

If you're a student or early-career engineer feeling some version of this: I don't think the anxiety itself is the problem. Mine mostly shows up when I stop and have nothing to push against, which tells me it's less about the state of the industry and more about how I've trained myself to only feel okay when I'm producing something. That's worth separating out before you let panic dictate your direction. The panic and the plan are not the same thing, and it's easy to mistake one for the other at 11 PM on a Friday. AI isn't a separate track you jump to after abandoning software; it's software engineering with probabilistic components. You still need pipelines, state management, latency control, and architecture that doesn't collapse under load. Wrapping an API isn't engineering—building resilient systems around it is.

What I do trust, so far: being handed ownership before I felt ready, and having to actually understand a system instead of prompting my way past it, taught me more in a few months than any tutorial has. Whatever tools or titles show up in five years, the industry will always reward people who understand what's happening beneath the abstractions when the shortcuts run out. I'm not calling that certainty. I'm calling it the one thing solid enough to build the next few months on while the rest stays unresolved.

There's a line from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement speech I keep coming back to whenever those questions get loud:

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path; and that will make all the difference.

— Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address (2005)

I hold onto that fully, because it's the only honest answer I have to the questions I opened with. I can't tell whether what I'm doing is right, whether it's enough, or whether it's getting me anywhere. From inside the week, none of that is visible. What I can tell, is that I'm still choosing my gut and my passion, that I'm still choosing to believe in what I believe, pivot and correct if I fail or go out course, and I'm betting it only looks like a line once I'm far enough down it to turn around and look back. I can't do that yet. So tonight I'm just going to trust the dots, keep placing them, and leave the looking back to a version of me who isn't here yet.