Final dispatch from @crowdsupply@hachyderm.io #Teardown2026: I am, of course, fully drained, and also I feel like I'm leaving Teardown with a lot more clarity than years past? Today, I attended @helenleigh@chaos.social 's talk, "Music Machines". I'm glad I did.
I've been thinking for a few years that I'd like to take a sabbatical, but I haven't really understood why, or what I'd do with it. Helen reminded me of what I had forgotten: play and discovery is the critical essence of the joy of building things. I knew that I loved building things, and I knew that I loved contributing to the world around me through building things. Engineering is an important part of this, but it's not the only part.
What I realized from this all is that what I've been missing is doing research. I spend so much time guiding my clients *not* to do research -- if there's a greased path by which they should can do something, they should -- and putting my nose down and doing engineering to get projects done and polished. But I realized that I have a lot of pending contributions that are just ready for some rough, unfinished-and-potentially-unfinishable, messy research. Playing around with things, figuring out how they work, taking things that are buried deep in the realm of commercial secret sauce and and bringing them to the open source world.
I realize that the sabbatical I want is not a break from work (I wouldn't know how to do that!), but it's a break from the kind of work that I've spent the last decade and a half doing, so I can do something genuinely new. I'm not sure, logistically, how to manage that yet. But if nothing else, I know where to start now.
Thanks for having me here and reminding me of what I'm really doing. See you next year, Portland.
