It’s been a busy year, and in particular a pretty crazy last-three-months, so I’m rounding out my 2015 by finally using up my paid time off at work and effectively taking December off.

What that means is I probably won’t be seen on StackOverflow or handling Autofac issues or working on the Autofac ASP.NET 5 conversion.

I love coding, but I also have a couple of challenges if I do that on my time off:

• I stress out. I’m not sure how other people work, but when I see questions and issues come in I feel like there’s a need I’m not addressing or a problem I need to solve, somehow, immediately right now. Even if that just serves as a backlog of things to prioritize, it’s one more thing on the list of things I’m not checking off. I want to help people and I want to provide great stuff with Autofac and the other projects I work on, but there is a non-zero amount of stress involved with that. It can pretty quickly turn from “good, motivating stress” to “bad, overwhelming stress.” It’s something I work on from a personal perspective, but taking a break from that helps me regain some focus.
• I lose time. There are so many things I want to do that I don’t have time for. I like sewing and making physical things - something I don’t really get a chance to do in the software world. If I sit down and start coding stuff, pretty soon the day is gone and I may have made some interesting progress on a code-related project, but I just lost a day I could have addressed some of the other things I want to do. Since I code for a living (and am lucky enough to be able to get Autofac time in as part of work), I try to avoid doing much coding on my time off unless it’s helping me contribute to my other hobbies. (For example, I just got an embroidery machine - I may code to create custom embroidery patterns.)

I don’t really take vacation time during the year so I often end up in a “use it or lose it” situation come December, which works out well because there are a ton of holidays to work around anyway. Why not de-stress, unwind, and take the whole month off?

I may even get some time to outline some of the blog entries I’ve been meaning to post. I’ve been working on some cool stuff from Azure to Roslyn code analyzers, not to mention the challenges we’ve run into with Autofac/ASP.NET 5. I’ve just been slammed enough that I haven’t been able to get those out. We’ll see. I should at least start keeping a list.