My Month Sabbatical

I am blessed to have been with Omnitech since 2007 (15 and a half years). My pastors are required to take off 6-7 weeks every 5 years to help them rejuvenate and refocus. In March of this year, I realized that I needed to do this as well. In my yearly review, I asked and our Omnitech leaders agreed. My current client was also very flexible.

I took off the full month of September, giving plenty of notice ahead of time. I had enough Paid Time Off to have 2 weeks of paid and 2 weeks of unpaid. This was a great privilege for us.

Thank you to the leaders of Omnitech for supporting our family, my great team there for enabling us to have a great company that can enable me.

What we did

We were able to go to my Uncle and Aunt’s farm for a long weekend. They had potatoes to dig, so we pitched in an dug up a pickup load. Then we washed, cut and canned 148 quarts of potatoes. It was fun for all of us to work together (even my Dad, Mom and Sister with her Husband).

We spent a lot of time together. There were a few weeks where I was able to be home during the daily life of homeschooling with my wife and 4 children. We spent a lot of time outside and I took the kids tent camping one night. We even got to volunteer at the Banquet and sorting at the Foster Closet as a family. I know we’ll all remember that month fondly.

I was able to get away with the love of my life. We left the kids with my Sister and her husband for 5 days and drove to Superior, Wisconsin by Lake Superior. Our college friend and her husband hosted us. We tent camped at Jay Cook State Park 2 nights for a cool, rainy night with beautiful day weather. The leaves were just starting to change. This picture is a re-enactment from our honeymoon week 16 years ago.

Keep Learning

I decided to continue my DDD & F# learning by reading Domain Modeling Made Functional by Scott Wlaschin . I had shared F# Introduction from a C# Developer earlier in the year. I haven’t found a better explanation of DDD, but then to combine it with functional programming is going to be a very important concept for me going forward. It’s changing how I think code can look like (since I’ve mostly done C# and JavaScript/TypeScript programming). I hope I’m able to convey the idea and help others to catch the bug as well. I’ve already gone through the code with others at a lunch and am promoting it as a book club for Omnitech in the future.

Here’s his code and a Recorded Session: Domain Modeling Made Functional - YouTube .

Pluralsight also has a DDD course we went through in August .

I also wrote up Ways We’ve Improved Our Environment and worked on a Clean Architecture presentation for Spreetail’s Annual Technical Conference (I’ll share more about that later).

Rest is important

"So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place." ~ Mark 6:32

Even Jesus needed rest from all of his work. I definitely needed it

A quick in search shows numerous reasons why we need to rest.

Highly Recommended

If you are blessed like I am and have an opportunity to take an extended break, I recommend you do it. It may require some financial sacrifice, but time is extremely valuable. Mix that time with being at home and going somewhere. Relax! Make memories. Use the extra time to learn and to help others. Get some home projects done and catch up.