Sabbaticals and seasons

What an adventure the first two months of my sabbatical have been!

It started with a last-minute flight to #Reactathon in San Francisco at Shruti Kapoor ’s encouragement, where I connected with the brilliant minds behind Solid, Kwik, and Astro at hackathons. Then I took a vacation to my old stomping grounds in Portland in time for #ChainReact where I gave a talk chronicling the saga of React and React Native’s dev portals. I loved the vibe of this conference—at one point, I was standing in a circle of former Microsoft, Meta, and AWS coworkers all working on React Native! I swung down south to Atlanta for #RenderATL, America’s best-dressed tech conf/music festival, where I gave one of my “Your Tech Career” talks on layoffs, and the engagement with attendees was invaluable. Lastly, I crossed the Atlantic to Amsterdam for Peter-Paul Koch 's #CSSDay where I got to hang out with the Chrome Dev Tools team alongside Una Kravets (and share all my long-simmering thoughts on multi-state animation editing and debugging tools!). CSS is exploding in 2023, and I'm so pumped web animation is taking center stage!

Post confs, I swung through London before detouring to Iceland for a much-needed “rest” that involved hiking up the sides of mountains to sit in hot spring-fed rivers.

I learned a lot on these trips from the conversations, the hackathons, and the quiet moments playing Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with friends. I learned a lot about where the industry is right now, where I am at, and what is a priority. Hiring and team growth are both in flux right now. Tech job seekers have to apply to 40% more positions before landing a new role compared to the height of the hiring craze in 2021. Changes in VC funding are changing how startups are growing. Almost every sector outside AI/ML is shrinking or plateauing teams. If you consider a career an investment, this is a bad market, a winter.

Life has seasons

I’ve been listening to “Necessary Endings” by Henry Cloud as a cathartic reframe for the challenges facing the industry today. One of the frameworks I love in this book is the idea of “seasons.” All things, from relationships to startups to careers, have seasons: spring for growth, summer for investment, fall for harvesting, and winter for winding down. For many people, this feels like the winter of their career. But it might also be a spring of sorts: time to plant seeds in underdeveloped areas of your life or things you want to pivot into.

I calibrate my life on four axes: work, play, love, and health, which I measure year over year. There’s no denying that my work axis has grown substantially over the last five years. I’ve let opportunities take me from the USA to Amsterdam to London and back. I invested so much in the work pillar of my life, and now it’s time to nourish the other three axes. I’m investing in play not just by traveling but also by giving back to the opensource projects I love and learning AI/ML; investing in love by nurturing relationships old and new; and prioritizing my health by working out—and getting to bed on time!

Giving back, sowing seeds

While on sabbatical, I’m collaborating on the opensource projects CodeHike, a cool UI library for explaining code while people scroll and interact with it, and Astro’s documentation platform, Starlight. And I’m hosting a weekly Twitter space with my friends Nate Emerson and Tejas Kumar where we discuss these crossroads so many people I met on this journey also find themselves in (watch my Twitter every Tuesday, 9am PST!). These things are more play than work, and let me give back to the community that has helped me get to a place where I can take this time for myself.

My window is always open for the right opportunity to return to working on a team, and I look forward to that day. But for now, I’m happy to be working with teams in the open—while focusing on the underrated joy of naps! May your life be full of more naps, no matter your season ❄️🌸🌞🍁