This is a first for me. I’ve got some personal projects I want to work on, and I really enjoy programming. Normally first thing in the morning I’ll spend an hour waking up, drinking coffee, and writing some code.

I’m a professional software developer, and software development is a passion and hobby. But I felt like I needed a bit of a reset so I’ve made an effort to not write any code at all during the Christmas/New Years holidays (about 3 weeks).

Honestly I don’t feel like I’ve missed out, but I’m definitely looking forward to getting back into it and I think I’ll benefit from it. Ill be back at it again next week.

I know 3 weeks isn’t a huge amount of time in the grand scheme of things. Have you found yourself taking a complete break from coding? How did you find things when you had to start up again? Felt like it benefitted you or ended up losing the trail a bit?

  • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3·
    19 days ago

    I always feel like I lose the trail. I barely ever even take lunch. I recently moved to a tech lead role and I barely have time to look at actual code. I still feel like taking time off is hard because I have to keep constant track of everything or I will completely lose the thread of everything that’s going on.

    I did get Friday off to drive back home from a working vacation. It felt great. The vacation was stressful as hell because I had family stuff and work stuff intermingled. I literally was in my car fixing an issue with a deployment one minute, boarding an airboat to look at alligators the next, and an hour later I’m in a forgettable meeting in the back seat of the car as someone else drives home.

    It wasn’t ideal but the vacation was booked before I had to change jobs and I went from being forced to take that week off to having to cover for 80% of my team. I’m definitely getting too old for this shit, but I enjoy it.

    • Jack@slrpnk.net
      3·
      19 days ago

      Making the new guy take the Christmas shift is a dick move on the part of the team/company.

      • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        19 days ago

        I agree, but I didn’t have the vacation days. I had just enough for the driving day and I think 5 or 6 days for an anniversary vacation in April.

        What shocked me was there was hardly any discernible lightening of the schedule. I expected the week to be pretty light, but I wound up in 8+ hours worth of meetings and deployments every day except Christmas Day. I was given half of Christmas Eve off, but I’d already put in 8 hours by then anyway.