Nothing shipped in July

There's a hole in this blog

Scroll the archive. April is dense — a post every couple of days, client work, this site getting built underneath me while I wrote about building it. May finishes with a week of shipping a SaaS with my daughter as the product owner.

Then nothing. Eleven weeks of nothing.

I'm not going to quietly backfill it with dated posts to make the graph look healthy. The gap is the post.

What "off" actually meant

The specifics aren't interesting to anyone but us, and I'm not going to perform them for a blog. Forests. Long stretches with no signal and no particular plan. A lot of coffee made badly outdoors, which is somehow better than coffee made well indoors.

The mechanical bits are worth writing down, because they're the part that transfers:

• The work repos weren't on the laptop. Not "I promised myself I wouldn't look" — not cloned. Reinstating one is a ten-minute job, and ten minutes of friction is enough to make you ask whether you actually want to.
• Notifications off at the OS level, not per app. Per app is just a to-do list of things you'll re-enable "only for this week".
• I gave people dates up front. Not "I'll be around a bit". Dates. Nobody has ever been annoyed by dates; plenty of people are annoyed by a vague answer that turns into a slow reply.

I didn't do it perfectly. I opened the laptop a handful of times. Twice it was justified, and the rest of the time I was bored and reaching for the thing I always reach for. Pretending otherwise would be exactly the sort of tidy story I started this site to avoid.

The argument I want to have

Here's where posts like this normally go: rest is essential, because you come back more productive.

I don't like that framing and I don't think it's honest. It's productivity wearing a cardigan. It says your downtime has to file a report — that it earns its place by improving next quarter. Follow that logic and a summer which didn't improve your output was a waste, which is a miserable way to look at your own life.

The break didn't need to justify itself. My kid was off school. The weather was good. That's the whole business case.

What it did anyway, which is a different claim

Having said that — things did happen, and I'd be leaving out the interesting part if I skipped them. I just don't think they're the reason.

The big decision got made away from the desk. I've got a large legacy platform to rebuild: 176,000 lines of module code, twenty-six modules, and about forty per cent of it welded to a single industry vertical over a decade. The question I'd been circling since spring was whether to refactor it in place or build it forward module by module, with the old code as read-only reference.

I'd been trying to answer that in front of an editor, which is precisely where you can't answer it. In an editor the in-place refactor always looks cheaper, because you can see the file you'd change and you can't see the eighteen months. It took being a long way from a keyboard for "build it forward, never edit the old one" to look obvious rather than brave.

Cold code reads differently. I came back to that legacy platform and read it the way a new joiner does. I couldn't remember what any of it was supposed to do, so I could only see what it said. Every name that's slightly wrong announces itself. Every comment describing a version that no longer exists is suddenly visible. You get that view exactly once per absence, it lasts about two days, and it's worth more than most code reviews.

Neither of those is a reason to take a summer off. Both of them are real.

How a break actually dies

Not with a dramatic relapse. One "quick fix" on day two. Then a small PR, because it's small. Then you're reading a thread on your phone at ten at night to stay across it, and by week three you've got the worst of both — not working, but not off either. Carrying the whole thing in your head and getting nothing for it.

The only defence I've found is refusing the first one. Not the tenth. The first one is the entire fight.

The countable thing

There's a version of this post that ends with a tip about calendar blocking. This isn't that version.

In May I spent a week building a real product with my daughter as the product owner. It was one of the best weeks of work I've had, and part of why it worked is that she was school-age and interested and available — a coincidence with an expiry date on it.

You can count the summers you've got left with a teenager in the house. It isn't an abstract number and it isn't large. Every one of them is competing with a quarter that will feel urgent at the time and won't be memorable afterwards.

Eleven weeks. Nothing shipped.

The rebuild starts in a fortnight: empty repo, a brief, and a decision I'd already made in a forest. I could have spent those eleven weeks working. I'd most likely have spent them refactoring the wrong thing.