No livestream this .. christmas eve. Family time and time off is on the agenda until January. To achieve that, this newsletter is written on a monday. Absurd.

Anyway, there is a Regular Programming episode about microservices that I almost failed to publish entirely.

Beyond that, I'm still potentially looking for some companies interested in reaching Elixir developers but nothing much is going to happen across christmas and new year.

Getting into the feeling

I often exist at a fairly intense rate and when I do that I'm terrible at registering the surrounding world, adapting to it, slowing down in time. This is how you end up ass over tea kettle into christmas celebrations. It really looked quite far away a moment ago. I had plenty of time.

This means a few things. I should probably revisit the whole slowing down part. Maybe re-listen to the Hurry Slowly podcast and be asked over and over again "who are you without the doing?". And more urgently, I need to wind down and get out of work, tech, networking, problem-solving, opportunity-finder mode and into cozy motherfucker with nothing in particular on his mind mode.

That's a sharp turn and not my easiest move. It often takes me a week or two to find the groove of a summer vacation. And that's when we typically travelled away from everyday context. I'm not sure I know what my groove is during christmas right now. I think I'll find out as I get used to doing christmas with a kid. She'll carve a path for us, I'm sure and I know my mission is to delight our little marauder.

So I feel entirely unprepared but I guess I do look forward to it a fair bit. I've always liked christmas, even as adulthood has diluted the magic of it to different degrees through the years. I hope for a rediscovery with children, getting to see what they see.

I don't care if you don't celebrate christmas. I'm not a christian, I'm just middle-of-the-road secular swedish which includes christmas traditions as part of the package. And while I don't have any kind of faith I believe quite strongly that ritual can be very helpful. It marks time, it shapes the year, it brings groups of people together who might drift otherwise. There is a lot to like about meeting, eating well, giving and receiving gifts and talking lots. Candles, fire and snow are also heck of an ambience. We might actually get snow this year (bloody southwest of Sweden usually doesn't).

Actually reading Priya Parker's book The Art of Gathering right now. I'm not sure I need to design christmas with more clarity of purpose, especially since we're hosted at the in-laws. But it does make me wonder what it will be like when some of these traditions fall into our own hands, when it is time to not go elsewhere anymore. Strange and somewhat exciting to think about.

Not even a premise of tech in this one. The season is truly here. Have a good end of the year if this is where you mark that and if you celebrate, merry christmas.

Send presents, glögg and rhymes at lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thanks for your time, I appreciate you reading this.

- Lars Wikman