If I Retired
If I retired tomorrow, here’s how I would would to spend each week:
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Writing fiction. I’m making slow but steady progress on a couple of middle-grade books and need another 30,000 words to finish off a YA novel I’ve been working on for several years. I started writing them for my daughter when she was young; she’s now in university, and unlikely to find them as engaging as she once would have, but I’d still like to finish them.
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Helping to assemble a new kind of undergraduate software engineering course in which learners explore what it means for programmers to be productive and how we can make it observable. I think this would be a good way to introduce young programmers to the difference between reliable research and plausible punditry, but I wouldn’t want to tackle it on my own: I don’t (yet) know enough about productivity and observability in software development, and too many of the projects that seemed like good ideas to me at the time have turned out to have fatal flaws.
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Teaching. I’m about to teach a workshop on organizational change, and helping with this paper has convinced me that one on how to end projects gracefully would be useful too. Really, though, I just want to get back in the classroom: for better or worse, AI Is the biggest change in teaching and learning in my adult lifetime, and I want to be in the thick of it rather than opining from the sidelines.
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Doing housework, playing the sax, and riding my bike or swimming (depending on the season and the state of my knees).
What I would want most, though, is a circle of friends to do these things with. I love my wife very much, but I’m never going to enjoy gardening or cooking as much as she does, and boardgames like Hive and Santorini aren’t ever going to be her thing. I always thought my younger brother and I would wind up playing chess in the park in our twilight years; as the nights grow longer and the leaves begin to turn, I’d like to have other people to do that with.