If I Retired

If I retired tomorrow, here’s how I would spend each week:

• One day a week writing fiction. (I’m making slow but steady progress on a middle-grade book and have the last 30,000 words of a YA novel queued up behind it.)

• One day a week on a sequel to Beautiful Code called Beautiful Reviews, in which experienced developers trade reviews of each other’s code so that we can see how they see the world.

• One day a week on either the second or third proposal for a new kind of undergraduate software engineering course.

• One day a week building a workshop on how to wind projects down. Helping with this paper has convinced me that this is a really important subject, even though (or because) people talk so little about it.

• One day a week contributing to some open source project, because I enjoy programming the way some people enjoy knitting or cooking.

I’d find time in there to ride my bike, play the sax, and do housework, and I’m sure that new projects would come up as these ones ended, but I think it would be a pretty satisfying life.