Rui CarmoI have been taking a bit more care of myself–largely by forcing myself out of the house as much as possible, completely shutting off Teams every now and then (focus time doesn’t prevent people from messaging you, only calling, even if it does mute notifications) and, by and large, getting up (and going to bed) earlier.
I’ve lost 3Kg over the past few weeks, which should tell you something about how my return to work has been going.
I’ve also silently quit pretty much every single social media site in existence (the new iOS feature to “hide” apps and require Face ID to access them is pretty useful for that), although I did go and check if the few people I still follow on Twitter have moved to Bluesky already.
Right now, I’ve put almost everything on hold–unless it’s essential to work, relaxation or self-fulfillment, it’s just not happening. Having burned out more than once, I know the signs, and I was clearly already way too deep before I switched roles–I should definitely have taken a break.
With more guardrails in place, work stress leveled off a bit and is… almost OK. The structure of consulting work is comfortable (if far from satisfactory) and lends itself to both keeping your mind busy and blurring out any grievances you may have towards specific projects, although I still hate the constant context switching.
That said, whatever free time I could scrounge together was mostly spent doing chores.
I’ve also tried to spend a little time converting a bunch of Python stuff to Go, for three reasons:
- Go is now over ten years old and finally stable enough as a language to both have enough batteries included for most of my common use cases and a stable library ecosystem (although I still don’t like the way packages are namespaced and mapped directly into URLs, or the way I’m pulling packages out of GitHub repos without much in the way of supply chain security).
- I’d rather write Go than C++ (or Rust) for my own things–there’s so much less ceremony and overhead for everything that I’m just more productive in it.
- As much as I love Python, I needed the challenge and the ability to write faster, more efficient lower-level code without dipping in and out of
async.
Besides that, this weekend I started playing with Xogot, Miguel De Icaza’s amazing Godot port to the iPad–and am loving it, although I’ve always found it hard to come up with game mechanics and code them.
And, of course, I’m watching Arcane again, and loving it, fully conscious that I will be very sad when it’s over. I haven’t seen anything else quite like it.
