I will be taking a vacation for July. So expect some of my publishing to quiet down. I plan to keep writing this newsletter and doing some livestreaming because I really enjoy it and want to keep up a good, rewarding habit. And get some alone-time. The kid is intense.

I'm also a smidge behind on cross-posting my videos to my website which is annoying. It isn't nearly as automated as I'd like it to be. So if you live via my RSS feed, you are not abandoned :)

Movement in the Underjord

My recent blog post about Elixir onboarding had the fortune to blow up on Hacker News which I know can be a mixed experience but for me it is typically fine. Nice to see the wisps go wild. At the time of writing I still have 160 concurrent visitors.

Sophie Debenedetto published her post An Elixir Adoption Success Story which I had a small hand in incentivizing as part of some community publishing work I'm doing with .. gasp .. DockYard. Hers is the first visible effort from that. More to come there. If you write about Elixir and have good stories around training/teaching/hiring, reach out, I have budget for more.

Another wild livestream with a guest. Gerhard Lazu helped me try a k3s setup for my Noted project. So if you've been curious about the CD part about CI/CD or doing lightweight Kubernetes/k8s, with Elixir or just in general, that should be a good video for you. He did ridiculously good prep, I was mostly there for the stupid questions and to operate OBS.

This was essentially me inviting him to show me more of his perspective after he invited me to come on to his podcast to argue about why he's doing it wrong :D Changelog.com's new podcast Ship It! is quite neat and I've enjoyed listening to it when I'm not on it.

The Teaching Elixir series now has covered the |> pipe_operator().

Regular Programming episode 5 is out. About ORMs.

No livestream this week

I won't be doing a livestream this week. I'll instead be respecting my culture for once and taking midsummer off. Expect to be back next week though it might end up on thursday or saturday because of reasons.

Brain Recharge Time, Scatter Focus Engaged

Take a look at the day and turn and stay in bed
- Sleeping My Day Away, D-A-D

I've been going at things pretty hard recently. My work days are tightly packed with activity, planned a week ahead. Execute, execute, talk to people, adjust schedule, execute, execute. I rather like it.

I enjoy what I do immensely a lot of the time. This makes taking time off and planning breaks a bit trickier. This does not mean I would dream of not having vacation time. So the law in Sweden grants full time employees 5 weeks of paid leave every year. I'm my own employer so that's less meaningful in my case these days. I can do more, I can do less and the money doesn't keep flowing in when I take a break the way it does for an employee. So the incentives have shifted from my time as an employee. Still, I will definitely have a vacation.

Yes, I'm aware that this works differently in other countries and that it is a sweet deal to not have to work a number of weeks per year. There is also a great culture of don't-disturb-me-on-vacation in Europe. Privilege acknowledged. Let's get back to vacation talk.

I know the break is a great thing though I'm not very excited to disconnect. I will be keen to get back to doing the work after a vacation, I'll have had time for my mind to wander, twist and turn things, decompress, refactor, restructure and rethink. I'll hopefully have read some books, mostly fiction, I'll have spent time with loved ones. I will have worked in the garden. Sweated in the sun. Stayed in from the rain.

I will do something this year that I typically avoid which is keep an element of my work-week going. I want to keep writing the newsletter and I want to keep streaming. And if I was travelling I'd just put those on hold. I expect to mostly be home this vacation. And I typically do some tech stuff when I'm off duty anyway. So this will give me some time on my own, at the computer to do things for Underjord, not for clients. And if I find it disrupts my rest and relaxations I'll let you all know and cut it until work picks back up.

If you have the option of taking time off. Remember to do so, value it.

There was some episode of the Focused podcast or Hurry Slowly that went into the value of not being focused on something in particular but rather having a scattered focus, letting your brain work through whatever is there and start lining things up. I've not been great about doing that recently. I haven't sat down to be bored, I haven't spent time walking and thinking to solve problems.

That's typically a sign I'm packing things too tightly and might be under some stress. I don't feel like I'm in any particular danger but having a vacation break is very welcome. And as I come back in August I might balance things a bit differently. I'm having the time of my life with the Elixir community, my client work, the connections I'm making, the people I'm reaching, the interactions with y'all. Taking a break can feel absurd when you got stuff your are excited to do.

I just know, taking that break has always been beneficial to me. I don't regret vacation.

So we'll be in touch but I might be wearing shorts while writing it. Hope you take some time off too this summer.

Do you have any vacation plans?
You can always reach me at lars@underjord.io or Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thank you for your attention, I appreciate you reading this.

- Lars Wikman