I’m struggling to disconnect from work. I’ve been working on an interesting problem for the last couple of weeks (compacting change data capture events from sharded MySQL servers into BigQuery). It’s an interesting technical problem. There are lots of optimization opportunities and novel patterns I can introduce.
I’m on vacation for the next two weeks but since starting my trip my mind keeps returning to the problem. I’ve even solved a few issues and come up with new patterns to try while daydreaming as we travel. Obviously I haven’t implemented any changes, I deliberately didn’t bring my work laptop with me. I emailed those solutions to my work email address so they get out of my head but that hasn’t helped. I just visualized more optimizations while hiking today.
There is no expectations from my leadership to work while on vacation.
How do others disconnect from work when I enjoy the problem solving aspects of my work?
Sharded MySQL is my nightmare, and my proudest achievement at the same time. I designed and implemented an architecture for a product that is backed by heavily sharded MySQL servers, a total of over 700 servers worldwide, with hundreds of thousands of tables. It’s a fun, and a terrible space to live in. You may actually enjoy this blog post I wrote. Not many will: https://blog.heckel.io/2021/10/19/lossless-mysql-semi-sync-replication-and-automated-failover/
As for your actual problem of how to disconnect, I’d suggest to find another problem to solve and think about. Something that is yours, not the company’s. Like an open source project, or a side gig of some sort. That’s what I do.