I took a 4-month break after 10.5 years working at 5 companies - from big enterprises to startups. I was okay financially, had a kid 9 months old at that time and living in a remote town.
That was the best decision I took. I got refreshed, learned many things about myself, and had a great time.
During that time period, I decided to build my own startup and then started thinking like a founder/problem solver than an employee. After 8-9 months, registered a company and building MVP on that, created a custom CMS and blog site.
Moneywise, I am constrained but very happy with my time and work I do. I used to dread Monday's but nowadays, I don't even put in alarm and is awake around 3:30 am and long work hours are tiring but not mentally exhausting as I don't answer to anyone and love the product I am building.
I have Macbook Pro with M3 Max chip - 14cores and 36 GB ram. I don't want to spend more than $100 on the total analysis as I will need to run similar categorisation for another 2.5M accounts
Yearly, quarterly, monthly plan - broken down again with weekly plan. Review each plan at the end of week, month and quarter.
Yearly, quarterly and monthly - I schedule an email to myself in future. Monthly goes into my notebook which is again broken into weekly plans and then follow the schedule daily to complete the tasks.
I have Linear cycles and create tickets, projects and stories to keep track of things for future reference. It also helps with commit and linking of the tickets to PR.
For notes, use the Documents feature of linear and separate based on the projects
I am in a unique position to answer the question as I started learning Software Development last Oct after working as Automation engineer for more than 10 years. Based on the skills and tech stack that I found would be useful to start a company are as follows:
- NextJS - FE & BE
- NodeKS - Express/Hono for backend specific
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS + Shadcn-ui
- MongoDB / Postgres
- Prisma ORM
- Resend / AWS SES
- Clerk / NextAuth
- AWS EC2 -> Backend Deployment
- Vercel
- GitHub
- Upstash Redis / AWS ElastiCache - DB and Session Caching
- Cloudflare / AWS Cloudfront + AWS WAF
- AWS API Gateway
You can keep 6-8 months to learn and build couple of projects using the tech stack
That was the best decision I took. I got refreshed, learned many things about myself, and had a great time.
During that time period, I decided to build my own startup and then started thinking like a founder/problem solver than an employee. After 8-9 months, registered a company and building MVP on that, created a custom CMS and blog site.
Moneywise, I am constrained but very happy with my time and work I do. I used to dread Monday's but nowadays, I don't even put in alarm and is awake around 3:30 am and long work hours are tiring but not mentally exhausting as I don't answer to anyone and love the product I am building.