It’s been over a year since I coded for a living. Now all I do is apparently ferry kids around, cook, and do laundry: all for no money, and rarely any thanks. It’s been a riot of a year, with lots of changes, very few which I would’ve predicted when I jumped ship. For starters, I didn’t know taking care of kids would be so time consuming. I know, who would’ve thought ;-). I knew it would be work, just not all encompassing. I really don’t know how people with jobs do it. Seriously, chapeau. That being said, even though things are busy, everything’s easier when you don’t have to juggle work. We still get to play with Lego’s before school, and we do stop on the way back to look at snails, collect rocks, and smack things with sticks. Now instead of one boss, I have 3, and an endless list of tasks. And to top it off, I no longer have work as a mental escape valve. Interestingly though, I don’t miss any of the things I thought I’d miss from work. Instead, I miss all the things I despised about work.

I don’t miss programming (there, I said it). It’s not that I don’t miss the mental stimulation, it’s that my brain is full with family logistics, and the little curiosity I have for prototyping the random feature, I can get by having a long session with ChatGPT. I can look at the mediocre code it spits out, that is mostly correct, that would probably cause a nightmare of maintenance issues and technical debt, and say… oh… I see where this is going… and close the laptop. I’m not thaaaat curious. On the other hand, you know what I miss? 1:1 meetings. I can’t believe I typed that out loud, because I hated them (and all other meetings), but I do miss touching base, and bouncing ideas back and forth, and having some semblance of a plan going forward. I mean, I still think frequent meetings are useless, but a catch-up meeting once a quarter is something I actually miss. So you know what I did? I scheduled periodic meetings with a couple of my ex-bosses. It’s funny how fun they can be, when they’re not forced on you, and when your status report mostly involves diapers and throw-ups.

Another thing I miss is planning. I hated quarterly planning. I always felt I didn’t need much hand-holding, since I had a relatively good idea of where projects were meant to be headed. I also hated management speak, and having to spend an inordinate amount of time describing common sense in a way that ticked all the boxes for corporate. I hated that shit! OTOH, having a medium to long term plan is something I miss. Now that I have no imposed structure, it’s easy to fall into cook, clean, and repeat. It’s also easy to forget everything you’ve accomplished without any record of it. When I was working, I could peek at past status reports and see where my year went. I had this sense of accomplishment. I mean, there’s a bit sense of accomplishment when I see Lola walking, or when Mai tells me he wants to do the last 100 meters on his own…as he races with his tiny backpack to school. So I’ve come to a happy medium… I bought myself a paper notebook where I write what I did in the past week. And yes, it has the same preamble I typed every week for a quarter of a century at Red Hat:

Highlights for week ending blah blah blah.

…

Plans for next week.

Yes, I know.. I quit work so I could write status report and cold call my bosses to volunteer life updates. Life is full of ironies.

But all in all, life is incredibly fun. I have time for my kids, for my wife, and for my friends. I pick up Mai for lunch 3x a week– taking advantage of the Southern European 2.5 hour lunch, where I can cook and have lunch with the entire family– on weekdays! Mai enjoys the relaxing lunch, Lola is ecstatic to have an audience as she throws all her food on the floor, and Alba gets a home cooked meal every day during her work lunch break. Cause, you know…somebody has to work ;-).