Reflections on a summer sabbatical
Summer’s end is creeping up on us. The heat and humidity make it seem like a point in the distant future, but it’s almost mid-August and that means about two months until hoodie and jeans weather. Daylight murmers about retreat. Nesting birds have all flown away. Soon the school busses will prowl the streets before dawn again.
In April I made the decision to take a summer sabbatical. My last two jobs were both with small-team startups that went the way startups do: not as I hoped, about what I expected, yet still worthwhile and rewarding experiences. But I got burnt out and with the rapid onset of AI mania gripping the software industry, I decided to take a risk and… step away from the ranks of the gainfully employed for the summer.
The decision wasn’t simple. I spent some serious time and effort crunching budget numbers, cutting discretionary spending, brainstorming fallback plans, chatting with wiser folks to make sure I wasn’t mad, and sketching out the projects I wanted to tackle while unemployed. My plan unfolded across notebook paper and spreadsheets. My wife and I gradually became convinced: not only was it possible, it was needed.
Part of my plan included a very conscious decision to step away from the screen. To step away from technology, and work in the real world with my own hands. To see the sunshine as much as possible. Partly this was just a desire to recharge my phsyical and mental health, and partly to avoid the absolute state of mental exhaustion I see plaguing software developers right now. My kettlebell instructor says to rest when the body demands it. Rest is not only about recovering the body’s strength, but growing beyond its strength. That’s exactly what I needed.
I’m proud to say that out of the twenty-six projects that I set out to accomplish, twenty-one are complete. Some were small, lingering tasks that have always taken back-burner to the more pressing demands of work and life. Some were larger efforts for which I had planned and budgeted, but never found time to work.
Two projects were most significant for me because I had to learn entirely new skill sets and work through whole new classes of problems over the course of weeks in order to complete each.
On my very first day of sabbatical, I got to work…
From shrubbery to flower bed
When my wife suggested purging the pitiful bushes out front along the porch, we began to brainstorm about using the space in a more aesthetically appealing way. We decided to turn the space into a raised garden bed wrapped with a stone retaining wall, and garnished with a water feature. I spent days researching how to hardscape, measuring the space, setting up level lines, getting utility company approval, estimating materials and shopping for stone. We decided to skip the big box stores and go straight to a hardscape supply yard for better quality material. We played with the space, setting stones next to each other, envisioning the final product and then decided on a particular sandstone that complimented the porch stain and house colors in general.
The bushes came out with some effort. We pulled out all but one with some digging and hatchet work. The last gave me a wonderful excuse to purchase a logging chain. After cutting the surface roots as much as possible and slinging the chain around its base, my truck plied the stubborn shrub loose with a few tugs. Chopping it up and bagging it for yard waste was more painful than the actual eviction.
“Dig-day” started in mud, as a rain had passed through the night before. My first pass at trenching took about a day and a half before I could start laying and leveling paver base, which is a rocky mix, almost like soft cement, that is packed hard into the ground. It forms a course “base” strata, the first layer in a triple-decker sandwich (base, sand, stone). A good piece of advice I encountered many times in my research (and from a friendly neighbor) is to ensure that each layer is as level as possible, up through the first row of stones. If your foundation is level, the whole wall will be level, so it’s worth taking the time to do it right, even if it is tedious and your knees hate you. I took this advice to heart, which meant spending several days getting the initial levels right – even re-digging a portion of the trench after the base had been laid because the underlying ground sloped too hard. After the paver base, I applied leveling sand and used a concrete trowel to painstakingly smoothed it to a sea of glass. It looked good. I was proud. And then the storm clouds came.
I was not going to let rain ruin my progress, so I employed a series of painter tarps anchored by loose stone and improvised a covering. It worked, mostly. Some of the leveled sand compressed a bit where the tarp, weighed down with accumulated rain water, made contact. Otherwise the defenses held, and I was able to resume work the next day. After some touch-up work on the sand, the first layer of stone went down completely level, without incident. The corner squared to the house. The extra effort measuring, digging, packing, and leveling had paid off.
The initial trench had been cut deeper than the stone depth to leave space behind the stones. In this space I laid down river rocks wrapped in a layer of weed guard to allow any water that traveled to the base of the wall a way to flow through. The stones were porous and rough enough that the space around them would drain effectively.
Each row had to be staggered, like masoned bricks, oriented to the corner stones. This meant that cuts had to be made where the stones met the house, and at each corner, alternating row-by-row as each were added. I had never cut stone before and decided to go cheap and use the cold chisel technique: cut a uniform groove around the stone with a chisel and hammer and then apply increasing force with each hit against the grove until the stone splits. I got lucky with a few cuts, and the truncated stones fit nicely. A few required additional chisel work where the cut wasn’t clean and the rough face had to be smoothed out. At this point I started to worry, as I realized I hadn’t exactly budgeted stone for failed cuts. Each row took a layer of stones off the delivery pallette, and the remaining stack looked mighty low. Still, I trusted my instincts. I had measured several times and padded the total count a bit, in case some stones were cracked on arrival. These would have to suffice.
To secure each layer, my father applied a generous layer of Loc-Tite landscaping adhesive to the layer below, while I carefully laid and tapped each stone above into place. The layers went up, one at a time, until all five were complete. The wall sat overnight before I started shoveling and leveling the filler dirt back in (mostly re-used from the initial trenching), then I topped it off with a decent layer of flower bed soil from Menards. Once complete, my wife used ChatGPT to pick and map out the flowers and greenery that would grow well in our shaded bed. We filled in the last bit of space between the raised bed and our front steps with a stylish fountain from Amazon.
“Built-in” bookcases
My wife and I read a lot of books. A lot of books. We love second-hand bookstores and library book fairs, a passion that necessitates the expansion of book shelves around the house. Fortunately we had a nice corner of empty space sitting at the top of our second story stairway, and it was in this space that my wife insisted we build a “book nook” where she could sit and comfortably read in her personal library. This nook wouldn’t be filled with just any bookcases, however – she had discovered “book-tok”, a whole virtual space on the popular Tik-Tok app for people who show off their book collections and storage strategies. Many of these tokkers embrace a “hack”, where they purchase Billy Bookcases from Ikea for a reasonable price, then frame them in such that they appear to be “built-in”. We looked at many different approaches and after some initial planning I concluded that, given our space, ignorance, and complete lack of experience doing anything like this, it was absolutely doable.
We chose the more narrow bookcases to build on because they made the best use of space and because we liked the visual aesthetic better than the wider cases. I sketched out several plans for the framing procedure, picked the best, and then started diagramming the project in LibreOffice. The corner bookcases would act as a positional “anchor”, using Ikea’s corner hardware to get the angles right. From there each other bookcase along two perpendicular walls would be secured by 2x4 wooden frames between each. This would add stability and ensure a 3” vertical surface to which we could attach moulded casing in the front. Each bookcase had an extension mounted to its top (effectively adding another shelf); above those I attached horizontal 2x2s that ran the perimeter of the bookcases to provide surface area for attaching the moulding.
The frames were fairly straight-forward. I learned to use pocket hole jigs for hiding wood screws, and reusable miter saw fences for consistent cuts. The real challenge was the baseboard and moulding, both of which are expensive – and in the case of moulding, expensive. Instead of buying pre-made pieces we decided to save money and make our own from MDF board and smaller shoe moulding. I bought an 8x4 sheet of MDF and cut and mitered all pieces to fit the top and bottom perimiter of the book cases.
The baseboard was simple to make, but the carpet beneath was a little bit of a challenge. For stability, I had cut away the carpet so the book cases would sit on the bare sub-floor, but this meant that the carpet had no corner attachment and would slacken over time. To mitigate this I reused the existing tack strips and added some new ones around the base of the bookcases, then used a knee-kicker to stretch the carpet back onto the tack strips. I left just enough room between the tack strips and the book case bases such that the MDF baseboard could be wedged down tightly between them, securing the carpet’s edge even more.
The MDF moulding was a bit more involved, as I also had to measure and miter the shoe moulding in such a way that when glued to the MDF board, it would all fit correctly. I cannot overstate how thankful I am that Harbor Freight has very cheap clamps, because I bought about 20 small ones to apply uniform pressure across the shoe on the longer pieces of MDF during the gluing process. But when all was finished my nail gun made installation trivial, and to my astonishment, most of the edges lined up pretty well. (For the other edges… well wood filler and caulk atone for a multitude of sins, let’s just leave it at that.) Where the bookcases met the wall we attached long pieces of quarter round.
The final steps held the most drudgery. Most cheap bookcases have shelves that can be repositioned with small pegs in a series of interior holes. To achieve the “built-in” feel, however, all of these had to be filled and sanded except for the holes we were actually going to use. This took a couple of days, followed by rounds of sanding, then priming, then sanding, then priming again (MDF board soaks up primer and paint far more than regular wood). I then ran beads of caulk along the ceiling, wall edges, and in remaining minor gaps between trim pieces. Once everything was relatively coated and smooth, we applied a layer of slightly warmer white paint and let the bookcases cure. The finished product looks like a professionally installed bookcase (one might never guess it is Ikea under the hood). My wife topped it off with a new chair and plans to further embellish the space as flashes of inspiration come to her. Which I am sure, will be soon and frequent.
Reflection
Stepping away from the job market for a while is a luxury that many people don’t have, and I am very grateful that I have had this opportunity. Specifically I am grateful to my wife who has been my biggest supporter in this.
It is easy to forget, when doing the same thing day after day, when solving the same problems time and again, when fighting the same battles over and over, listening to the same talking points in the same meetings in the same industry for years on end, that I am capable of more than I know. That the burnout I feel when my brain starts to actively reject what drags it down is not due to a deficiency or lack within me, but is simply an automatic reaction to prolonged “hostile” circumstances.
This isn’t to say that the places I’ve worked, or the people I’ve worked with, have been hostile. On the contrary I’ve worked with some of the best people doing some pretty cool things.
But the software industry is not what it used to be. Especially in the web development space, where framework and tooling fatigue is real, and most projects are half-baked, quasi-abandoned implementations with little-to-no documentation. Truthfully it’s probably always been a bit this way, but the explosion of “fast fashion” in this space has been very fertile ground for satire from popular YouTubers like Fireship and Kai Lentit. Everyone knows its a problem. AI, the artificial elephant in the room, has amplified it even more. It has gifted us the moniker “slop”, which accurately describes much of what technology culture produces. Truthfully it’s as disheartening as Brutalist architecture and Missouri humidity is oppressing.
I needed to get outside of it all and challenge myself with other things, and I’m glad I did. It has given that part of my brain that writes code a much needed rest, and afforded me opportunities to solve entirely different classes of problems in unrelated spaces. What comes next? I don’t know. But I am confident that this summer’s sabbatical has been the best prep for it I could possibly have.
