For more than twenty years, I wrote code almost every day. If I was not putting down some code, I could write documentation, or a design plan, or perhaps a blog post. And, among the act of writing these different things, I never felt a real difference of purpose: the drive was the same, to produce something beautiful in some way. At some point, my true goal, of expressing something with code and the ideas of design that such code exposed, well, that goal started to be in conflict with the fact that Redis, the biggest system I produced in my career, was critical to many IT environments. So, what was next? To shift into a field of more freedom: starting writing literature. In this talk I’ll show you how I started writing code, why it was so important to me, how and why I changed field of programming at least three times during the years, and why, finally, I had enough of it and wanted to see what was next. Then I’ll compare my coding experience with the one of the last two years, during which I wrote my first sci-fi novel: Wohpe.