Sabbatical Magic

A couple of weeks ago, I kicked off my first sabbatical since starting at Automattic a little over five years ago1.

Dan sits in front of two laptops (one of which shows a photo of an echidna for some reason), in a meeting room full of casually-dressed volunteers.
The first weekend of my sabbatical might have set the tone for a lot of the charity hacking that will follow, being dominated by a Three Rings volunteering weekend.

The first fortnight of my sabbatical has consisted of:

  1. Three Rings CIC’s AGM weekend and lots of planning for the future of the organisation and how we make it a better place to volunteer, and better value for our charity users,
  2. building a first draft of Three Rings’ new server architecture, which turns out to mostly work but still needs some energy thrown at it,
  3. a geohashing expedition with the dog, and
  4. a family holiday to Catalonia, Spain.
Dan, Ruth, and JTA with their children and a tour guide called Julie, enjoying churros in a Barcelona cafe.
You’d be amazed how many churros these children can put away.

The trip to Spain followed a model for European family breaks that we first tried in Paris last year2, but was extended to give us a feel for more of the region than a simple city break would. Ultimately, we ended up in three separate locations:

  1. Barcelona, where we stayed in a wonderful skyscraper hotel with fantastic breakfasts and, after I was able to get enough sleep, explored the obvious touristy bits of the city (e.g. la Sagrada Família3 and other Gaudían architecture, the chocolate museum, the fort at Montjuic, and because it’s me, of course, a widely varied handful of geocaches).
  2. The PortAventura World theme park, whose accommodation was certainly a gear shift after the 5-star hotel we’d come from4 but whose rides kept us and the kids delighted for a couple of days (Shambhala was a particular hit with the eldest kid and me).
  3. A villa in el Vilosell – a village of only 190 people – at which the kids mostly played in the outdoor pool (despite the sometimes pouring rain) but we did get the chance to explore the local area a little. Also, of course, some geocaching: some local caches are 1-2 years old and yet had so few finds that I was able to be only the tenth or even just the third person to sign the logbooks!
Dan and the kids atop the remains of a castle tower.
All that remains of the Castell del Vilosell is part of a single tower, but it affords excellent views over the rest of the village as well as being home to a wonderfully-placed geocache.

I’d known – planned – that my sabbatical would involve a little travel. But it wasn’t until we began to approach the end of this holiday that I noticed a difference that a holiday on sabbatical introduces, compared to any other holiday I’ve taken during my adult life…

Perhaps because of the roles I’ve been appointed to – or maybe as a result of my personality – I’ve typically found that my enjoyment of the last day or two of a week-long trip are marred somewhat by intrusive thoughts of the work week to follow.

Dan sits at a laptop in a hotel bar, a view of Barcelona out of the window behind him, a beer bottle alongside him.
I’m not saying that I didn’t write code while on holiday. I totally did, and I open-sourced it too. But programming feels different when your paycheque doesn’t depend on it.

If I’m back to my normal day job on Monday, then by Saturday I’m already thinking about what I’ll need to be working on (in my case, it’s usually whatever I left unfinished right before I left), contemplating logging-in to work to check my email or Slack, and so on5.

But this weekend, that wasn’t even an option. I’ve consciously and deliberately cut myself off from my usual channels of work communication, and I’ve been very disciplined about not turning any of them back on. And even if I did… my team aren’t expecting me to sign into work for about another 11 weeks anyway!

Dan, standing in an airport departure lounge, mimes "mind blown" to the camera.
🤯🤯🤯

Monday and Tuesday are going to mostly be split between looking after the children, and voluntary work for Three Rings (gotta fix that new server architecture!). Probably. Wednesday? Who knows.

That’s my first taste of the magic of a sabbatical, I think. The observation that it’s possible to unplug from my work life and, y’know, not start thinking about it right away again.

Maybe I can use this as a vehicle to a more healthy work/life balance next year.

Footnotes

1 A sabbatical is a perk offered to Automatticians giving them three months off (with full pay and benefits) after each five years of work. Mine coincidentally came hot on the tail of my last meetup and soon after a whole lot of drama and a major shake-up, so it was a very welcome time to take a break… although of course it’s been impossible to completely detach from bits of the drama that have spilled out onto the open Web!

2 I didn’t get around to writing about Paris, but I did write about how the hotel we stayed at introduced our eldest, and by proxy re-introduced me, to Wonder Boy, ultimately leading to me building an arcade cabinet on which I finally, beat the game, 35 years after first playing it.

3 Whose construction has come on a lot since the last time I toured inside it.

4 Although alcohol helped with that.

5 I’m fully aware that this is a symptom of poor work/life balance, but I’ve got two decades of ingrained bad habits working against me now; don’t expect me to change overnight!

× × × × ×

3D Workers Island

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Fake screenshot of Internet Explorer 6 showing 3dwiscr.com/what.html, a web page about a freeware screensaver.

If you’ve come across Tony Domenico’s work before it’s probably as a result of web horror video series Petscop.

3D Workers Island… isn’t quite like that (though quick content warning: it does vaugely allude to child domestic abuse). It’s got that kind of alternative history/”found footage webpage” feel to it that I enjoyed so much about the Basilisk collection. It’s beautifully and carefully made in a way that brings its world to life, and while I found the overall story slightly… incomplete?… I enjoyed the application of its medium enough to make up for it.

Best on desktop, but tolerable on a large mobile in landscape mode. Click each “screenshot” to advance.

Bluesky and enshittification

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.

There’s a name for this dynamic, from the world of behavioral economics. It’s called a “Ulysses Pact.” It’s named for the ancient hacker Ulysses, who ignored the normal protocol for sailing through the sirens’ sea. While normie sailors resisted the sirens’ song by filling their ears with wax, Ulysses instead had himself lashed to the mast, so that he could hear the sirens’ song, but could not be tempted into leaping into the sea, to be drowned by the sirens.

Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self’s weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact – think throwing away the Oreos when you start your diet.

Wise words from Cory about why he isn’t on Bluesky, which somewhat echo my own experience. If you’ve had the experience in recent memory of abandoning an enshittified Twitter (and if you didn’t yet… why the fuck not?), TikTok, or let’s face it Reddit… and you’ve looked instead to services like Bluesky or arguably Threads… then you haven’t learned your lesson at all.

Freedom to exit is fundamental, and I’m a big fan of systems with a built-in Ulysses Pact. In non-social or unidirectionally-social software it’s sufficient for the tools to be open source: this allows me to host a copy myself if a hosted version falls to enshittification. But for bidirectional social networks, it’s also necessary for them to be federated, so that I’m not disadvantaged by choosing to drop any particular provider in favour of another or my own.

Bluesky keeps promising a proper federation model, but it’s not there yet. And I’m steering clear until it is.

I suppose I also enjoyed this post of Cory’s because it helped remind me of where I myself am failing to apply the Ulysses Pact. Right now, Three Rings is highly-centralised, and while I and everybody else involved with it know our exit strategy should the project have to fold (open source it, help charities migrate to their own instances, etc.) right now that plan is less “tie ourselves to the mast” than it is “trust one another to grab us if we go chasing sirens”. We probably ought to fix that.