Taking a Sabbatical

The point of the sabbatical is that I don't have any goals, but I'll use this task to share my experience. Similar to what I did in my recent trip to Japan.

In a way, this will be a simulation for my retirement (which is definitely decades away 😅). In my recent mini-life in japan, I divided my trip into 2 distinct chunks: 3 weeks working remotely, and 3 weeks on holidays. This time, I intend to blend the two, and see what my life is like when I don't have to work for a living. Honestly, I don't think I'll be on holiday mode all the time, because I do enjoy my work and I don't like the idea of spending months without programming. But I also won't be traveling alone, and both of us will be unemployed, so I'm sure that will skew our tendencies.

The current plan is to spend most of August in Spain, which is usually a time where most people around here is on holidays, and fly to Asia in early September. We don't have many plans beyond that, and we'll probably fly to wherever is more convenient. So far, Singapore seems like a good starting point.

It's been a month since I started the sabbatical, and so far it's going well. Being August, and the first month of the sabbatical, it felt like holidays as usual. But I'm happy to say that I've also been doing some coding, and I haven't been completely afk.

My intention is stil to blend the two, but I've decided that I'll separate these updates in Life stuff and Tech stuff. That way, if you're only interested in the tech stuff, you can skip all the ramblings about my personal life.

Life stuff

As I'm writing this, I'm still in Spain. But the preparations are made to leave for Singapore on September 6th (this Friday). I'll be spending a couple of days there before moving to Malaysia; and so far, I don't have any plans beyond that.

This past month has been pretty chill overall. I spent some time at home, did some mini-trips around Catalonia, and went camping for a week in Asturias.

That last one was interesting, because it was my first time camping by myself (I actually did it with my partner, but I mean without parents). It's something I've wanted to do for a while, but for one reason or another we always stayed in hotels or albergues. I'm very attracted to this type of lifestyle, because I do agree that we have a comfort crisis. I also started reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which has been excellent so far. So camping and doing the Camino de Santiago have been very valuable experiences. But always that I've done these, it's been completely divorced from my work because I never bring my laptop along. I guess the real test will begin in Asia, because this time I intend to do it, and it'll be for an extended period of time.

Right now, I'm going through a mix of excitement and anxiety. Excitement because I've been looking forward to this for a long time, and anxiety because I worry too much about the future and "planning stuff". But whenever I think about it, I realize I have a priviledged life without any real problems. I have to learn to live more in the present!

Tech stuff

Whenever I thought about my sabbatical in the past, I assumed I'd have infinite time to do everything in my TODO list. But of course, that didn't happen. In fact, I've realized something. When you say you're in a sabbatical, everyone around you also assumes you have all the time in the world, and they don't respect your time as much. However, if you say you're self-employed (even if you aren't earning a single cent), people take your "work time" more seriously. So maybe this whole sabbatical thing was a mistake 😅. But I still think it's an experiment worth pursuing, we'll see how it goes.

All of that to say, that I no longer have any hopes of making any real progress in this sabbatical :/. But not to sound too grim, I found something better: building Proofs of Concept (or "Spikes" as some call them). There are many ideas I've had in mind for ages, but never started because the task seemed too daunting. But this month, I gave a couple of them a chance and I was pleasantly surprised.

One of those has been building a Solid Server from scratch. This is obviously not something I'll complete in the sabbatical. In fact, it's one of my ideas for a full-time project. But following the spirit of doing whatever I feel like, I just started typing away. And I got it working in a single day. I'm not sure how far I'll take this, but I'm very excited about it and I may continue tinkering with it during these months.

Something else I worked on was animations. For a while, I've heard from many people I admire that Framer Motion is one of the few reasons why they aren't using Vue (such as Josh Comeau and Adam Wathan). And since I started taking Emil Kowalski's course on animations, I decided it was a good time to start playing with this. So I created a library (for now a folder in a project) called Vivant. Again, this is not something I will finish in the sabbatical (or maybe ever), but it was fun to start tinkering. Ironically, it wasn't as easy as implementing a Solid Server from scratch, but I've already implemented a couple of animations in Focus and it seems to be working well:

I'm entering the 3rd month of my sabbatical, and I can officially say that I'm growing tired of it 😅. I know, I know. A guy complaining that he has too much free time, give me a break. But that isn't the problem. This is the first time I've been living as a "Digital Nomad", and I don't like it :(. It's fine for a couple of weeks, but I've been traveling for almost a month now, and I miss a lot of my routines. That's not to say that I'm not enjoying it as well. But I'm certain that this is not something I'd like to do in the long term... at least not like I'm doing it now.

Life Stuff

As I mentioned in the last update, we landed on Singapore on September 6th. I'm now writing from Pattaya (Thailand), and we traveled here on land (buses, trains, etc.). Crossing Malaysia, and stopping along the way. So far, we've been to 8 cities. Which isn't a lot compared to other times we've travelled, but our lifestyles have been quite hectic. In fact, the only period I've felt "at home" was the 7 days we spent on an Airbnb in Kuala Lumpur.

Again, I want to emphasize that I'm enjoying the trip (even though you may not feel it from my writing 😅). The trouble is that I'm experiencing an overload of stimulus. I miss the quiet times at home, I miss cooking my own meals, and yes, I miss "wasting time" watching TV Shows and movies. One of the most worrying things is that I can see how my health is deteriorating :(. Again, like in my trip to Japan, I'm finding it difficult to find non-animal sources of protein (or healthy options in general). And I haven't been working out nearly as much as I should.

But if I had to pinpoint the root of all evil, that would be my lack of time affluence. Again, the same as in Japan! Which is totally self-imposed, so I'll have to make an effort to slow down and avoid the temptation to "go out and do things".

Anyways, that's it for my ramblings, sorry that you had to read that.

So, we landed on Singapore. Besides being quite modern and extravagant (maybe some would call it "artificial"?), I really liked the mixture of cultures. Other cities I visited had similar vibes (Barcelona, without going too far), but Singapore really felt like a melting pot of different cultures. Unfortunately, we only spent a single day, so I'm looking forward to going back at some point.

Malaysia surprised me in a couple of ways. I didn't expect most people to speak English (which shows how little I knew about their history). And overall, it was very easy-going. I was also surprised at the number of malls (also in Thailand). We definitely don't have as many in Europe, and I don't remember seeing so many in Taiwan 10 years ago. In some ways, I like malls, for all the obvious reasons. And I love going to the cinema. But I also despise the consumerism and blandness of it all. Unfortunately, we end up going more often than I would like for their convenience and ubiquity. We've also visited a lot of temples, food markets, and other attractions. One of the highlights of the trip has been visiting some tea plantations in Cameron Highlands (did you know that tea plants live hundreds of years and are harvested all year long? There are even thousand years old in China :O).

In Thailand, in contrast, cash is king and English skills are more of a rarity. But I also enjoy the quirkyness and novelty of a different culture (though I'm not melding in their daily life as much as I'd like). As expected, there are a lot of TukTuks around (there is even an "Uber for TukTuks!"). And I'm feasting on coconuts and mangoes (again, probably not too healthy 😅). We also attended a cooking class and learned to make a Sour & Spicy soup, which I'll certainly try to replicate at home (though I'm not sure I'll find the right ingredients).

Finally... Durians. They are everywhere, and despite having travelled to other Asian countries in the past, I almost didn't know of their existence. I'm sorry to say that I don't like them, but people around here seem to love them.

And that's mostly it for the life updates! Here's some pictures from the trip:

Pictures

Tech Stuff

This month, I've been pretty consistent spending an hour or two in front on the computer every day. Unfortunately, I don't think I've done a single day of full-time work, so I haven't practiced too much flow and I miss it tremendously :(. Again, it's mostly self-imposed and I'll have to make an effort to slow down. Now I see what they mean about the dangers of having too much freedom!

Ironically, something that I've been doing a lot is reading. What years of routines and timeboxing didn't accomplish, commuting has. I've spent a lot of time in transit, so I've been catching up with books and articles from my lists.

I've also managed to get some things done. First of all, I finally submitted my proposal for NLNet! I initially planned to apply for the deadline of December 1st. But after getting some tips from previous grantees (shout-out to Sébastien from ActivityPods and Niko from NextGraph), it seems like it was more sensible to do it now if I plan to start working in January. I submitted 3 proposals, even though I only intend to work on one, because I'm keen to hear what they have to say about the different ideas. They are essentially the ones I talked about in my blog post, but more fleshed out.

There's also been some developments in the world of Solid, and I've been participating in the discussion (TLDR; Inrupt released a Wallet Application they claim to be compatible with Solid, but I don't think it has anything to do with Solid and it's actually a proprietary solution). It really is a bummer, and I don't like to be the portent of negativity. That's why I was mostly neutral, if not positive, in my previous commentary on Inrupt. But this crossed the line, because it was misleading to people who may not be too familiar with Solid (even if not on purpose). So I thought it was important to speak out.

Finally, I also kept tinkering with some things related to Focus. I did some improvements here and there, but mostly I've continued playing with Vivant. It's still a proof of concept, and I don't have much to share yet, but I'm very excited about it. I love working with animations/UI, and Josh Comeau announced he'll be working on an animations course; so it'll be the perfect excuse to learn more about animations. In particular, I've been trying to recreate Shared Layout animations from Framer Motion, and I've seen how they can become very complicated very quickly. Making these from scratch involves doing some math, but thankfully this is not my first rodeo. So yeah, I don't know if this is going to lead anywhere, but it's a ton of fun. I guess that's the perfect thing to be doing in a sabbatical :).