This is no news – the pandemic is impacting everyone now. My problem is, it has been the 4th year since my last time visiting families in Asia because all previous travel plans were interrupted by all kinds of reasons.
Every four years, Morningstar provides a generous fully paid six weeks sabbatical to its employee. I was about to spend my six weeks sabbatical back in Asia but now it seems unreachable. So I decided to spend the six weeks in the US. Travel domestically? I hope I won’t be the one help spreading the virus.
So finally I choose to stay home for my personal projects:
1. An engineering project: I’d like to complete a small engineering project. I want to ensure I won’t be bored while coding is entertainment to me. The other reason is, I hope this small project can provide insights and reminders to my second project.
2. A summary project: I started my career journey 13 years ago. I worked on a lot of projects, enjoyed various tech stacks, pursued open-minded leadership, experienced innovation from waterfall to agile and on-premise to cloud. But I was always busy, either for work or for my family. Though I do summaries and exchange ideas with my wife (she works in the software product management domain) periodically, I’ve never gotten a chance to aggregate those ideas, approaches, lessons, and opinions with a dedicated time. It’s time.
For the engineering project, I prefer to do something I am not so familiar with, like IoT, but I didn’t find a real fun and useful project yet. While I was using Excel to manage the cashflow of my family, I plan to create a simple tool to help me, and probably other folks who think it’s overkill to hire a financial advisors. If you have any ideas about small projects, it’s not too late yet and I would appreciate it!
For the summary project, I’ve started the agenda of the summary. I was a bit surprised that I listed so many worked items to build a modern software. Each item could be a real big topic, let me choose a few priorities to start my record.
Good time to have a sabbatical! For the project, try use PersonalCapital to manage accounts? It can track transactions nicely. Maybe spend the time to mentor another student how software engineering works?