For a bit over thirteen years I've kept a fairly steady rhythm on this blog — a post every couple of weeks, denser around the interesting releases, thinner when life got loud. I'm about to break that rhythm on purpose. In a few days I'm stepping away for an extended stretch to travel with my family, and I mean properly away: not the kind of away where I still answer email from a hotel lobby and call it a holiday.
I'm writing this mostly so the silence doesn't get misread. A blog that simply stops usually reads as neglect — the author got busy, lost interest, quietly gave up. That's not what this is. The posts will pause, and then, in the summer, they'll start again. Nothing's wrong. If anything, something's right: I've reached the point in a long run of work where the most useful thing I can do for the next stretch of it is to close the laptop and go stand somewhere unfamiliar for a while.
I've come to trust that instinct. The clearest thinking I've done about data, architecture, and how any of it actually serves the people on the other end has almost never arrived at a desk. It shows up on a walk, on a long flight, in a conversation with someone who has never heard the word "medallion" and never needs to. Distance is not the opposite of the work. Now and then it's the part that makes the rest of it worth reading.
So: no posts for a while, no live-blogging the trip, no dispatches. Just a gap I'm choosing. I'll see you back here when the weather's warmer and I've got something worth the interruption. Thanks for reading — hold the thought until summer.