Sabbatical Update (Week 8)

July 30, 2021

Summary: (23 July 2021 to 29 July 2021) Still building the Bookworm Club, still reading Infinite Powers, possibly taking on a 1-month technical writing contract.

Reading

I'm about halfway through Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz. It's still fascinating, enjoyable, and rewarding.

Last week

I continued building the Bookworm Club. The authentication workflow stuff took longer than expected. I wanted to do a fancy password-less login workflow, but was disappointed to eventually realize that Firebase doesn't really support it robustly. I made decent progress on the Goodreads integration, which was exciting because it's one of the core ideas of the site.

What's next

I'm considering taking on a 1-month contract to help a startup with their docs. It's a tough decision. I may as well go into the details a bit here for the record.

Pros:

• It sounds fun to help this company.
• I would replenish my savings.
• It may be in my long-term best interest to start building up connections so that I can do more contracts like this in the future.
• I have a sabbatical project related to technical writing, and the experience from this contract will probably produce new ideas/insights related to the sabbatical project.

Cons:

• It's the age-old dilemma of sacrificing my time and energy for money.

I've already decided to go for it if we can agree on terms.

In the meantime I'm going to continue working on the Bookworm Club.