Something is shifting in how design and software get made. The tools are moving quickly, quickly enough that it feels less like new features and more like the craft being rebuilt while we use it. I don't think anyone knows yet how far it goes. But it for sure feels like standing still through it will have a cost.

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I left Bemakers as part of a restructure a month ago, and have made a deliberate choice to do something I’ve never tried before.

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I’m going to take a break.

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The timing feels right. This is the most unsettled the craft has been in my eighteen years, and the usual move is to spend a moment like this tied to someone else's roadmap, learning only what the next sprint happens to require. I have a rare chance of meeting it with my hands free. So for now I'm choosing not to work, but to learn, to breathe, and to be around for my family while I do it.

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The plan is simple enough. Learn these tools properly, by building real things with them. I also want to build things I actually care about, partly because that's the only way I stay honest about whether they're any good, but also because one thing I do know already is that my next role will be in a field I care about, and the surest way to find that is to spend this time making things in one.

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There's a quieter reason underneath it. I used to design in my own time, for the love of it, and somewhere in the last few years I stopped. I'd like to see what happens when I actively choose to design and build - not because someone told me to.

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I'm going to write about it as I go. Not as a record of having figured anything out, because I haven't, but because thinking in the open is how I think best, and because I suspect the next stretch is worth keeping notes on. So this is the first one. There will be more.