I’ve decided to take some time off from full-time work, perhaps a little risky during a pandemic – but I feel like I need it for my own mental health. I recently started to feel burnt out at work and to prevent any further burnout I’ve decided to take an extended period of time off. Fortunately, I have some savings that should be able to tide me over until I get a new job that really excites me.

I feel that the recent projects I’ve been working on at my work places have been a bit of a slog, largely because I haven’t been feeling very challenged and haven’t been learning many new things that really excite me.

I have not fully decided what kind of projects I’ll be doing during my time off, but I have a couple of lists of different languages and projects that I could potentially be interested in. I’d like to start simple and work my way to more complex projects while making blog posts about them; my only aim is to ensure everything I work on is fun, exciting, and interesting.

Here is a list of projects I might be interested in working on:

• Rebuild this blog – using a headless CMS and a static site generator like Gatsby or Next.js
• Building apps using React Native
• Building my personal portfolio website (finally!)
• Something related to AI and reinforcement learning
• Creating something with actual hardware (e.g. using an Arduino or something similar)

List of languages / Frameworks I’d like to learn:

• Python
• WebGL / three.js
• Clojure
• Lisp
• Java
• C++
• C

I might not reach all the items in my lists during my time off, but I’m really looking forward to exploring everything here as much as I can.