A Major Disaster and a Run of Bad Luck
There's always something I think about but find difficult to resolve
I'm writing this calmly, but yesterday and today one of the biggest disasters of my life unfolded. I was working on LabVIEW code from National Instruments and then uninstalled it, but the uninstaller touched the boot system in the process, wiping it completely, and on top of that, a recovery service made a mistake that destroyed my SSD.
Half of the knowledge I had documented over three years, along with projects and contracts, is gone.
At least the project I'm currently working on is on git. That's some comfort, but I'm not sure how I feel. The tears just come.
I've tried recovery, but nothing can be recovered.
Some of my notes were backed up on another local disk, but the agent conversation history, sections, the harness agent I had built, and the projects where I couldn't use git due to NDA obligations are all gone.
I knew that NI's programs tend to dig deep into the OS and are notoriously hard to uninstall, but I never imagined they could cause this kind of damage to the hard drive.
I see no hope in life. This isn't just feeling depressed; three full years of my life are gone. Knowledge, even if it can't be fully recovered, can at least be reconstructed over time, but all the projects I had built, my accumulated knowledge, and my entire environment setup are wiped out.
The web projects I kept on git are fine, but the game project I spent two years building, which was too large for git, is completely gone.
On top of that, some PHP websites are gone. I need to manage and operate those too. Some of them are on git, but certain sensitive parts weren't committed, and that content is now lost.
When I was defrauded in the jeonse rental scam, it wasn't my fault, but what happens with computers is my fault. My own mistake made recovery impossible. It was the decision to run the NI uninstaller, and then the botched recovery attempt afterward.
I see no hope at all.
When will I ever rebuild my development environment from scratch? What about the code I had written? The assets I paid for? When do I even start reconstructing all the AI markdown files, memory, and skills? What about the MCP servers I built? And my transaction records for career verification?
I have no idea what to do with my future.
I work as a freelancer, but proving your career history as a freelancer is genuinely difficult.
So I kept scanned copies of my contracts. Those were my lifeline. But more than half of them are gone now.
You can get some sense of experience from transaction counts on freelancer platforms, but most of the bigger deals don't go through platforms at all; they come through personal connections, so there's no record left behind.
Proving my career was already hard enough, and now this. What makes it even harder is that the most difficult parts of my work history are tied to gray areas, and the logs and materials I kept for those are gone too.
My biggest career achievement is also in that category: streaming video fed from Southeast Asia at 3,000 concurrent viewers per minute. The work came from a Chinese client, which makes it hard to put on a resume. I learned about streaming layers, database sharding, graceful shutdown, and more, but I can't really claim any of it. I honestly don't have the skills to re-implement the full system from scratch anyway. I was mostly the one who designed the architecture, monitored it, and fixed issues on top of what the Chinese company had originally built.
The pay wasn't great to begin with, but at least I had something to show as a career credential, and now that's gone. The hardest reality for freelancers is that the good work, like projects through the National Procurement Service or government contracts, mostly goes to larger companies or gets taken at rock-bottom margins,
and in the regions, equipment companies operate on personal connections, typically through people who left certain firms as executives.
I've never worked at a proper established company, so that's another thing I can't put on a resume.
For academic research assistance, even if you implement a specific paper's metric from scratch, almost nobody considers that a 'contribution.' You're lucky if they at least make the code public or leave your comments in; most of them delete even those. But I can't say a word about it, because if I do, the work stops coming.
On top of that, even some of my legitimate credentials are under NDA. As a result, the tangible evidence I can actually use to prove my career can be counted on one hand.
Why am I poor when I've done so much work? Looking back, my project rates ranged from roughly 550 to 650 per month. But the problem was that I often had to cover my own room and board, and even when a one-month job stretched into two months, I'd still only get paid for one. Then there's the debt and the scams on top of all that.
Recently I went to Gasan Digital Complex. I had a few conversations there about some nursing home-related development work, but I was turned down because I couldn't prove my career history. The person who had introduced me looked embarrassed and apologized, and personally gave me bus fare home, but it still hurt.
At the same time, I don't have the name recognition to break into large-scale, high-profile systems. The kind of work where I could actually charge decent rates is mostly gambling sites, and those are legally risky and not something I want to do.
As a latecomer, I constantly think about what I could build that would actually change the game with real impact. But honestly, I know I have limits. I'm not that broadly skilled at programming. I've seen genuinely extraordinary talent in this field, and I'm at the level where I'm just glad to have the basics down. The one silver lining is that AI has recently narrowed the gap, but that's also what has decimated my market value.
These days, running illegal operations inside Korea gets you caught quickly, so those businesses have mostly moved abroad. Some guys I used to work with made the jump and say things are going well, urging me to join them. I'm pretty certain they'd stab me in the back at the first opportunity, so I've been ignoring them.
Freelancer platforms are being flooded with experienced programmers lately. Work is shrinking, and I genuinely don't know what I should be doing.
The tears just come.
Life is exhausting. My bank account is empty and everything looks bleak.