Career Break: What Will I Do
For the past 5½ years, I’ve been saving towards retirement, but I recently decided to take a career break. This is the second post in a two-part series:
- Career Break: How I Got Here
- Career Break: What Will I Do
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
- Mary Oliver, The Summer Day
What will I do
North star
If you’re familiar with my journey into programming, you’ll recall my childhood dream was to make video games. 👾 Life took a “detour” and I ended up doing web development for 28 years. 🤷🏼♂️
When I had some free time between jobs in 2012, I gravitated towards graphics programming (OpenGL) while learning Go. Unfortunately I didn’t get that far before I went back to working. Those bills won’t pay themselves! 💸
When I published Get Programming with Go in 2018, part of my motivation was to pay it forward, being a self-taught developer who learned from books.
Learning how to make indie games and sharing my learnings are my long-term aspirations. I have been saving my pennies and looking forward to fully investing my time and mental capacity into that goal.
Goals
As a starting place, I would like to build the skills and experience to confidently participate in a solo game jam like Ludum Dare. Not just programming, but unleashing my creativity in art, animation, sound, music, game design, UX, writing… all the things!
I’d like to do some experimentation before committing to any specific language or game framework. For game jams, I intend to pick a light-weight framework that supports WebAssembly, such as Ebitengine or Macroquad.
Longer-term, I’m interested in graphics programming and game development from scratch. I like learning how things work. Shipping finished games is secondary for me, at least right now.
I recently built a new Windows 11 desktop with an 8-core Zen 5, Radeon 9070 XT, and a 32" 4K QD-OLED monitor. It’s totally not just for playing video games. Honest!
It has taken some time to familiarize myself with working on Windows again, as I’ve been using macOS for development for the past 24 years. Fortunately, a lot of tools are available for both.
My other goal is to refresh my blog and do more writing. If I see the makings of a book, I’ve also been wanting to use Typst for a real project.
Habits
Beyond working towards the big goals, I plan to invest some time into these habits every week:
- The usual suspects: healthy eating and exercise 🌱 🏃🏼
- Learning to play the piano 🎹
- Practicing traditional art 🖌️
- Reading more and sharing book summaries 📕
My career break begins on July 1, 2025. 🇨🇦 I have a number of ambitious goals – probably too many. I plan to do a follow-up in a year, and I fully intend to write more posts along the way.
Thanks for reading! 👋🏼