I wrote up both the background of this little break as well as my goals and hopes for it in some detail back in early November, so I will not rehash those here. Suffice it to say that it has been wonderful. I am much refreshed, and very much looking forward to doing the work of finding my next role over the next few months.

I had a few hopes at the start of my sabbatical:

• make a bunch of progress on the large orchestral work I started back in 2021;
• learn Racket, including Typed Racket, and use it to learn how to build programming languages, starting by working through PLAI;
• finish a couple in-flight essays;
• write a decent bit of code, e.g. for my next-generation personal website builder and perhaps some related to one or another of those in-flight essays;
• and read a lot of books.

But as I (foot)noted there:

I write “hope” rather than “plan” because the meta goal for this sabbatical is to rest and reset. Holding any of those plans too tightly would be a recipe for ending up frustrated if I failed to end up accomplishing them: rather the opposite of the point of a sabbatical!

Happily, on that key point the sabbatical has been a smashing success — and a few of the hopes, too:

• I have made significant progress on that orchestral work (and I mean significant progress), and also wrote another short work for a much smaller ensemble. More on both of these in my post on the rest of life.

• I did learn enough Racket and Typed Racket to finish PLAI.

• I made some progress on my site-builder and wrote a bunch of code in the course of working through parts of both Functional Programming in Lean and Crafting Interpreters.

• As for reading a lot of books? Oh yes. See the Reading post!

• I have not made progress on my in-flight essay/posts (though perhaps I still will in the next few days after I publish this!), but that is okay. The point, again, was to rest — and so I have. The essays were the thing I chose not to prioritize given relatively limited time.

On that last note: three months is both a very long time off and not all that much time at all. It has gone very quickly! It has been the right length of time, though. I feel very ready to get back to work in 2024, and that absolutely was not the case when I started this sabbatical.

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One thing I hoped to get to but did not mention in that post was redoing my office at last. I have joked often for the past few years that my office was the room where we ran out of steam when moving into our house almost six years ago. It was not entirely a joke, though. My home office is a repurposed bedroom, and the closet has for all those years been full of boxes of books — ready to be unpacked, but not unpacked.

From 2016 – 2021 I used a maxed-out iMac as my personal machine: it had all the headroom I needed and then some to get done everything from programming to podcasting to composing orchestra music. In mid-2018, though, a previous employer required everyone to do their work on work-supplied machines rather than personal machines: a reasonable enough request for a company with a lot of customer data floating around. That was not easily compatible with my iMac taking up the whole desk, though. I ended up getting a huge L-shaped desk, putting the work machine on one side and mine on the other hosting. With no time to really design the room at that point — I was sufficiently overwhelmed by work as it was — I adapted my existing setup, pointed the desk at the window so I could easily enjoy a good view and not block it with either my work or personal computers, and got back to work.

It stayed that way for the next half decade. I never loved the space or the layout, but I had never really had the time to sit with the space and consider how else it might work. In late 2021, I replaced the iMac with a maxed-out MacBook Pro, which handles all my personal work far better than the iMac could, and is portable to boot. That might have been a good time to revisit the setup, but I once again did not really feel I had the mental space to tackle it. I had a handful of sketches from a couple years ago when I first started thinking about how I might improve things, but that was as far as I had ever gotten. Instead, I used some home office budget to provision another big display, roughly replicating the old setup with a dedicated 5K display for each machine.

But then I left LinkedIn at the start of October, and had some time on my hands! I started mulling on how I could use the time to make my office someplace really nice. Back in late November, I sat down one Sunday evening and took those initial sketches, iterated on them extensively with input from an architect friend, and ultimately turned them into an actual plan. With Jaimie’s help, I have actually accomplished that plan over the past month.

First and foremost, I changed the desk layout and reoriented it in the room. I laid out the desk so that when I have a work computer again, I can simply plug it into the same single cable that I plug my personal machine into and be off to the races — monitor, camera, microphone, even headphones. I sold off my now-extraneous second monitor.¹ With the extra monitor gone, I aligned the desk with the window and closet here, though leaving enough room to access both. This means I now have a lot more working space on the desk, even with a 61-key MIDI keyboard on the window-facing part of it.

That change also makes for a really nice active transition from looking at the computer to looking out the window. In the previous layout, I had a 45º angle between computer screen and window. In some ways, that was nice, because it mean looking out the window was just a glance to the side. I have found over the past few weeks that the 90º turn to the window and open desk space is even better, though. A head turn is still possible, but when I want to switch away from the computer to just thinking or to working purely in paper and pen, having a dedicated space backed by the window view is much better.

Second, we tackled the rest of the room. We bought some more bookshelves and unpacked those final boxes at last. We added a reading chair by a table and lamp in the corner. We hung a bit of art around the room. With the backdrop for the computer now being a pair of sliding closet doors, we bought a curtain rod and hung some blue velvet curtain panels there — which not only improves the view but also substantially decreases the reverberance of the room. We replaced the ceiling light with one that is both brighter and much more visually stylish and interesting.²

It is amazing the difference this fairly simple set of changes has made. Everyone who walks in notices immediately that it feels both cozier and more spacious. Quite a trick! It is now also the kind of place my daughters like to come hang out, enjoying the comfy reading chair (or, hilariously, the floor!). That chair is also a place I can come sit to read for hours on end purely for pleasure — or where I can transition to for dedicated study of something for work, while staying in my office. The location of the MIDI keyboard makes it easy to use for working out ideas, both just messing around on the keys and jotting down notes with pencil and staff paper.

All told, this office update may end up being one of the most significant parts of my sabbatical!

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Notes

1. Some people are two-or-more-monitor people. I am not among them. On the other hand, I would love a next-gen Apple 6K monitor… or even an Apple 8K monitor. (Why Apple? Retina is why.) ↩︎

2. Why oh why is this the standard for house ceiling lamps?

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