The walks we didn't take

Finalborgo, thirty-three degrees, hills going dry in the sun. The campervan's parked behind me, my girlfriend's somewhere in the shade, and I've got a laptop open on my knees because strackt goes live in a month and the finishing touches don't put themselves on.

And it feels great. Getting to work on strackt from a place like this is one of the better things I've managed to arrange for myself, and after five and a half years the thing is finally close enough that "launch" is a word I can say without flinching.

In April 2021 I took a proper timeout. Closed the code editor, closed the research tabs and the learning videos, went to one of the local islands for a couple of weeks. When I wrote it up afterwards, the "what got done" list said: relax, sleep, disconnect. My dreams went back to normal things instead of code constructs.

I needed those breaks, and not because the work was crushing me. That's when the hard decisions got made. Ansible or something else, what the MVP actually was, whether the whole thing was worth continuing — you don't settle those with the editor open. You settle them somewhere with nothing to do, and then you come back and build.

I don't take them anymore, and it isn't discipline or the deadline. The work is simply different now. Foundations mean deciding things you can't undo cheaply; refinement means a lot of small things where the right answer is mostly obvious once you sit down and look at it. I can do that between swims. I couldn't have decided the provisioning model between swims.

For the first time I can actually see the plan come together. Most of what's left isn't a question anymore; it's a list.

I spend all day prioritizing — what ships, what waits, what's genuinely a launch blocker. Turns out I do it at breakfast too, and I'm quite a lot worse at it there.

It does cost something, just not much, and not to me. I'm present but half listening; she says something and I answer, and the answer is fine, but part of me is still in the test run I left open. And there were evenings where we could have walked down into Finalborgo for a passeggiata, and instead I was on the laptop.

She understands and nobody's keeping score, which is exactly why it's easy to miss. It doesn't show up as an argument. It shows up as the walks we didn't take.

We're home on the 25th; strackt goes live on the 28th. Three days, which is about as much margin as this year has offered.

The laptop shuts at six tonight, though. We're going for that passeggiata.