It may come as a surprise (or not) to those of you who see me posting on the Redis mailing list, or who've been involved in the writing of Redis in Action, or that work with me on a daily basis, or that I give technical advice to, or those that I would call friends, ... but I am tired. Actually no, I'm fucking exhausted.
In the last year and four months, I've played the architect and lead engineering role in the rewriting of an entire online meal ordering platform, I've advised 3 startups on how to scale/re-architect their backend (one of which grew from 50k users to 380k users in 1 month, still growing just as fast), I've advised countless Redis users how to use Redis, I spent one year of my evenings and weekends writing my book, I've worked on several of my own open-source projects, several personal projects that may turn into side-businesses, I was invited to and spoke at 4 conferences in 4 months (a different talk for each one), I've spent the last 2 months part-time working from home to help take care of my first child, and for the 5-6 months before that, doing my best to take care of my pregnant wife.
I used to joke that I was a machine; that the act of helping people, giving advice, writing software, all of it, was rewarding and invigorating, and that I didn't need to take a rest from it. I was wrong. Aside from a couple long weekends in the last year, and 2 weeks after my daughter was born (during all of which where I replied to work email, still worked from home on occasion, and took phone calls), I've been running at full speed the entire time with only the occasional movie/video game night or spending time with friends.
I need a vacation. Somewhere with a beach, warm water, good snorkeling, and decent waves for body-boarding and/or surfing.
When and how I will take a break, I have no idea.
Take care of yourselves out there, it's all too easy to push yourself to the limit for too long, and to deny that you need to take a break.
