Month away takeaways

I’ve made it about 4 weeks into a self imposed sabbatical and I’ve found through experience that retrospectives are important, especially when trying something new.

This last month, I’ve spent a bit of time in nature with visits to Duke Gardens and the Neuse River Greenway Trail.  We also got to celebrate two birthdays with bar crawls in Durham and Raleigh.  With the increasingly nice weather I’m looking forward to more activities outdoors with friends.

Indoors we experienced Dune 2 with the highly addicting Alamo spiced popcorn.  I want to say we prepared for the upcoming Furiosa movie by watching Pete Wentz play a flamethrower guitar at the Fall Out Boy concert in Raleigh.  I pitched this to the band I’m in and I think we’re quite a ways away from being able to afford the insurance required to have this much fire on stage with us.

Feeling the heat with Fall out boy

I also have been reconnecting with my kitchen.  I’ve doubled down on brunch with breakfast potatoes, waffles, eggs, french toast and waffles in different arrangements.  As I’ll explain later, I got my BBQ grill working again which means burgers, chicken, and steak are back on the menu.  I also brushed off my hand mixer to make some cupcakes and cookies for one of the birthday celebrations.

Yard work?

Turns out the thing I’ve wanted to be doing this whole time is yard work.  The weather has been getting warmer and one thing I’ve always wanted to do is create some more usable space in my backyard.  I started by pushing back the ivy that had been covering about 8 feet of the yard and exposing a really fun Japanese maple.  Currently seeing if I can make grass grow in the early spring, I’ll have to update the progress of that project later.

I have been putting off maintenance of my 2010 Weber grill and I have a policy of deeply understanding something before lighting propane on fire.  That is to say, I have a tendency to take apart things often and understand how they work.  So I spent last weekend wrestling rusted screws, inspecting burners, bathing slightly rusted components in vinegar, reseasoning grates, and reassembling one of my favorite outdoor devices.  Surprisingly, aside from a few minor replacements, the whole grill still runs just as well as it did 14 years ago.

In case you can’t tell, we’ve made it to pollen season

Time for video games

A friend had gotten me into the current phenomenon that is Helldivers 2 which has been a ton of fun to roleplay a dystopian starship troopers future where bugs and automatons stand opposed to liberty, freedom, and managed democracy.  You do this with squads of 4 people, injected into hostile planets with large explosives that often backfire on your squad.

What has been super interesting to watch is how this 100 person studio has responded to the sudden success.  For context, the first Helldivers game maxed out at 6,744 concurrent players, with the rapid success of this launch, they needed to scale game servers to support over 450,000 active players.  This is a major technical challenge even when you don’t have a sudden time crunch to meet the expectations of a newfound player-base.  

Shoutout to all of the developers and operations people working nights and weekends so me and my friends can have some fun.

Player stats and scaling challenges

Talking to people at all stages of startup growth

Finally, I’ve been grabbing lunch and coffee with folks which has been a big boost of energy.  Whether it’s people who are hunting for “product-market fit” with an outline of an idea or leaders who have systematically grown their businesses to a reasonable size and trying to decide what’s next.  Everyone is out there solving problems and finding new ways to do things better.  Book some time with me on my website if you want to catch up.

I was talking to a founder of an eight person company with a mixture of local and remote people.  His co-founder and him have been through a startup cycle and wanted to get the team together in person while it was still a small group.  They just got back from a retreat at Breckenridge, CO where they got snowed in for an extra day.  When I asked “where do you do your best work?” a couple weeks ago I should have listed a ski cabin as an option.

I expect to spend more time jumping back into the triangle startup community in the next month.  I’m still not sure what size or shape organization I’m planning to jump into next, I do plan on following the energy.  April 9-12 that energy will be in Durham & Raleigh for the 3rd annual Startup Week and I’m looking forward to reconnecting with some friends and making new ones.  Communities have always been what make any type of work fun, I’m fortunate to have found this one!