I haven’t been blogging much lately, and it turns out there is a very good reason.

My last technical blog post was October 1st of last year. After I hit publish on that one I went to get ready for bed and found my wife lying on the bathroom floor in excruciating pain.

I took her to the hospital. She was diagnosed with pancreatitis which is a truly horrible disease. Her hospital stay was an insane rollercoaster and she ultimately died nine weeks later.

So yeah. It’s been a shit year.

After she died there were a lot of bureaucratic tasks to be done – at least doubled because of our dual US/Canada citizenships. Google gave me a month of leave and I took a month of vacation and I came back… not at all better. Grief is a long process, complicated by the fact that I’d only fairly recently moved back to Vancouver – I had practically zero close friends nearby.

As I tried to piece together a new life I found that work – especially remote work, isolated in my home office – was not a useful part of the healing process.

I had already dropped down to 80% time – just 32 hours a week – but even that felt like a burden. Work kept interfering with getting outside, spending time with people, and exercising. I decided to take a three-month leave of absence, both to focus more time on healing and to see if I would miss work at all. I did not miss it. Not one bit.

Four years ago I was having fun at work, solving interesting bugs, writing tutorials, and generally living my best life. I published eleven blog posts that year. Even Covid didn’t slow me down. Back then the idea of stopping would have seemed crazy. But my best work has usually been random discoveries – improbable bugs that were often polite enough to manifest on my machine before they affected anybody else – and there was always the risk that these random discoveries would peter out… and they seemed to be doing that. Maybe all of the bugs in Windows have been fixed now, or maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, but even before the shit hit the fan a year ago I was already not finding as many exciting things to do.

If you then layer on grief it’s not surprising that my motivation dropped. It’s not surprising that I started to resent every meeting that reduced my flexibility for playing tennis or other more fun and social activities.

And so, after getting a thumbs up from my financial adviser, I decided to quit. To retire as soon as I got back from my leave. I gave notice on the 10th anniversary of starting at Google and my last working day is October 4th, 2024. I am taking my work/life balance and turning the dial all the way to “life”.

Maybe this will be my last blog post ever. Or maybe I’ll investigate and write up a few issues that I have notes on. We’ll see.

And maybe my readers can help. I won’t be finding crazy bugs at work anymore, but I’ve had a few blog posts that were triggered by somebody reaching out with a problem.

I can’t promise that I will investigate any particular thing, but if you have a performance or stability or floating-point problem that seems like it might pique my interest, and if you are motivated enough to either help me reproduce it or to send me traces, then, well, who knows?

And, if you work for a company that has Windows performance problems and you want some private consulting, well, I can still be motivated by money, so reach out.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged death, grief, life, retirement. Bookmark the permalink.