A friend once shared with me a way to think about work projects that has been very useful and made life easier over and over. The idea is understanding what type of project you're dealing with — a "Heavy Lift" or "Simmering" project — and treating it accordingly.

The reason I took almost a year off to learn programming was because I recognized it was a Heavy Lift. The nature of Heavy Lift projects is you need long stretches of focused effort to do them properly or efficiently. The physical world analogy would be moving a couch up a flight of stairs. You don't move it halfway up, leave it for a day or two, and finish later. You do it all at once. Learning any large body of knowledge is always a Heavy Lift (think university degrees).

(Of course some Heavy Lift projects can be done a piecemeal, but it's often much harder and not as efficient.)

Now that I have a large enough body of knowledge about programming, my app has turned into a Simmering project, i.e. one that I can slide off the backburner for a couple hours in the evenings make progress. The nature of Simmering projects is they are best suited to short bursts of effort.

So with Revere simmering as my side project, I'm returning to job searching and working as a product manager at a company again.

This will bring me back to how I like to practice my craft:

On one side... in full-time, professional work doing big things with teams,

and on the other with a side-project... playing, exploring, and experimenting with my ideas.