Life in a Sabbatical

After over half a year of preparations, July 31st, 2024, marked the last day of my CTO role and the starting point of my first-ever sabbatical. 🥳 Incidentally, this month also marks my 16th work anniversary after graduating from college and starting my tech career, so I consider this sabbatical long overdue!

In the days leading to the sabbatical, friends and family often asked me what I intended to do to fill my time. The truth is, taking a sabbatical carries an opportunity cost since I'm forgoing any potential income I may earn had I joined a company's board instead.

Based on this realization, I committed to considering my sabbatical as an investment in my future self. I will consider this sabbatical a success if it generates returns from "investing" the opportunity costs.

What kind of investments, though?

The returns do not necessarily involve monetary gains. For example, having better health, learning new knowledge, helping others, and building dreams are all items of intrinsic value in themselves, and I will consider generating them as a successful return on investments from a sabbatical.

Thus, within hours of signing off from work the last time, I dusted off my GitHub account, fired up VS Code, and took a stab at web coding.

I'm a lifelong backend guy who spent the last 8 years in tech management, so I was horribly out of touch with the current practices of web engineering. The last time I did hands-on coding on the front-end side, React wasn't even a thing yet.

Yet that first official night of my sabbatical was gloriously delightful. For the first time in years, I had the freedom to code until midnight without worrying about my morning meeting or whether I would do such an irresponsible thing as catching a cold.

Yes, it was frustrating at times, but the moments of joy that come from solving bugs and seeing all the puzzle pieces come together make up for all the hair-pulling moments, and I truly miss those.

So far, a couple of weeks into the sabbatical, this has been the most fun I had in the past eight years. I am a builder at heart, so being able to build tech by my own hands (figuratively) instead of building a solid team that builds techs (like what I did these past eight years) is immensely enjoyable for me.

Will I be able to sustain this enjoyment? The honest answer is I don't know. I'm constantly reminding myself to not turn this sabbatical into a burnout. Yet, there's so much to learn about building new stuff that I think I can keep myself busy for at least the next few months.

Focusing on building stuff will be an immensely risky endeavor. There's a huge chance what's being built will not go anywhere, but I believe we can still have fun doing so. Here's to the unknown future; cheers to the risk-takers; let's see how far we can go. 🥂

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