Book Club 4/2026: Work/Life Balance
Greetings from Nottingham! I'm on vacation this month, you might have noticed that I haven't posted a blog in April. I'm still keeping up (somewhat) with side projects, and that includes this blog. However, I haven't been researching anything in the domain of software for a bit now, so since I promise to use this book club to track what is currently on my mind, here's some thinking on taking time off and maintaining a life balance.
Software engineering is rife with romantic stories of overworked founders and startup employees; glamorizing the idea of the hyper-productive engineer is probably a major contributor to negative trends like engineers abusing Adderall or the dreaded "sure, we can use blockchain for that" attitude. Working in the appropriate moderation is better; having the necessary time to pursue leisure and hobbies and life forces us to use work-time to pursue quality work. Not blockchain. Diligence in only working so many hours in a day, days in a week, and weeks in a year is a higher virtue than being able to crank a million lines of code in one sitting, I think.
