In April 2025, I quit my job for personal relocation purposes, and remained unemployed until September 2025. I had never gone through such a gap before, but I had a plan to keep busy, and I mostly stuck to it. In the end, my day-to-day didn’t turn out much different from what it was in my previous job. In this post, I’ll go over the things I did.

I moved to another country

The main reason I ended up with so much time on my hands was because I relocated to another country. To achieve that, I emptied my home, sold it, and went through some paperwork. That kept me busy for the first few weeks.

I rewrote the management app of a side project

Objective: Learn modern frontend development

I have this side project called Lys. I wrote an Android management app for it years ago and didn’t bother to properly maintain it. It grew old and slow. At the same time, I wanted to finally learn about modern frontend development using a framework.

I rewrote this app as a responsive Next.js webapp and learned about React (components, states, etc.), Typescript, Tailwind CSS, SWR caching, Vercel, as well as designing responsive webpages that don’t entirely suck. Learn more.

I built an app for public transport in my new city

Objective: Get into Node.js backend development

This project started as an excuse to build a backend API using Typescript and Node.js. I didn’t cram in as much learning as I had hoped, but I still managed to learn a thing or two about Typescript, Prisma, Javascript testing and mocking with Jest, CI/CD, and Sarajevo trolleybus lines. Learn more.

I made a portfolio

Objective: highlight side projects and associated learnings

I wanted to show some of my side projects and highlight certain aspects & learning points in more than a few lines on my resume.

The result is a five and a half thousand HTML/CSS lines slide-based one-pager website filled with details, explanations, and illustrations, carefully crafted to look neat on both desktop and mobile. Check it out!

I wrote blog posts

Objective: document findings & thought processes, and train my synthesis & restitution skills

I wrote a variety of blog posts on topics ranging from side project deep-dives to technical showcases and documentation, namely:

• Revisiting Lys, a Eurovision-flavored social media bot
• Deploying an Express API to Vercel
• Using SQLite for your Node.js/Prisma integration tests
• Free Fixed URL to your latest Vercel preview with GitHub Actions
• GitHub badges without third-party services nor GitHub pages
• AWS SDK - GetLogEvents does not return all LogEvents
• Filling a career gap (this post)

I got married

I love her more than anything.

And I also

• killed dozens of rainbow goblins in Diablo 3 and I regret to report that I still haven’t obtained the cosmic wings.
• watched a lot of tennis. That French Open Alcaraz-Sinner final was something wasn’t it
• drank a lot of Bosnian coffee and yes, my džezva overflew a couple of times