The Secret Developer’s Vacation🌴Guide
Welcome to the holiday season! I’m on vacation right now and wanted to let you share where The Secret Developer spends their hard-earned PTO.
If I tilt my head at a 45° angle I can see this:
Obviously, if I look down, there is a laptop with this blog and some code.
That’s a happy holiday
I know this won’t be everybody’s taste in vacation. So, I present to you The Secret Developer’s Vacation Guide. Where are the best places to go for developers, and how to make the most of your time away?
Let’s take a look at the hottest developer destinations and how real developers hang out at them to get the most from their vacation experiences.
The Beach
Pro developers spend time in their hotel rooms as the sun will reflect from your laptop screen and make working difficult. Remember to pack an external monitor for setup in your hotel room!
The beach offers many opportunities for a productive vacation. Sandcastles represents an analogy for entropy, and being on the beach offers opportunities to read Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. However, sand in your keyboard will mean Apple’s geniuses will:
Know you went on vacation
Invalidate your warranty
Developer vacation score: 4 / 10
The Woods
The lack of Wi-Fi on a vacation will discourage all but the most dedicated pro developer, who will run down their cell battery to make sure they still join the daily standup. Tree canopies make a great shelter from the summer sun’s glare, and remote locations remove the possibility of meeting other people (so the pro developer can focus on refactoring a helper class).
If you’re one of the zero people who use binary trees at work, the woods provide inspiration for the data structure too! It might be an issue that you’ll starve due to the fact DoorDash won’t deliver to remote locations, so you’d be better to make it a short break.
Developer vacation score: 7 / 10
Sports Events
You might choose a staycation to ensure you can still pop into the office to see support in case there is an MDM problem on your work machine. You might choose to catch “a game” with the gender nonspecific “guys” to celebrate your time off.
Then you realize:
You all hate sports
The “guys” dislike you
Noise is inversely proportional to your concentration
The view is better on TV than from your discount seats at the game
The WiFi doesn’t work
Developer vacation score: 2 / 10
SF for WWDC
Of course, no real developer would be seen at WWDC, so ignore this one entirely.
Developer vacation score: 1 / 10
Asia
What could be better than a break in Asia! Pro developers understand the benefits of ubiquitous super-fast WiFi and the availability of cheap hardware and software for the discerning shopper.
Ramen? I’m guessing that will be available.
This destination gets The Secret Developer Stamp of approval
Developer vacation score: 9 / 10
Conclusion
I’m sure you’re all pro developers and don’t take any PTO. You’re probably on an unlimited vacation time job, so that is tacitly encouraged by your employer.
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think