After doing design for so long I just didn’t feel excited about what I was doing day-to-day nor did I find the discussions in the industry that interesting.

But I never really got tired of programming and at this point in my life the latter meshes better with what I’m interested in – privacy, encryption, hardening or subverting systems, etc. – than the former. I also get to reapply knowledge that was abstracted away while I predominantly did front-end development.