Damn, wish I had known about that 10+ years ago, I would have definitely done it.

Would probably be difficult to do that nowadays, although it's tempting. I doubt my partner would be comfortable with me being away from home that long, though. Even me going to a convention for a few days seems to be pushing it sometimes.

There used to be a monthly hacker night meetup near here at an app dev shop, and that was fun to go to and code around other people, but that died with the pandemic.

There was one time period about 20 years ago of about two months where I did a daily sabbatical to the library when I was in between jobs, and spent ~4 hours just working on my games each day (and I started the day with about an hour reading classic books before heading to the quiet work area). I remember growing a lot as a programmer then, and I released one Flash game and made major progress on another during that time.

Second this, I know several close friends who have done the Recurse center and they say it's a phenomenal experience, one of the best things they've ever done. Generally speaking the job placement afterwards is also not all that bad if you decide to go back into the workforce.

Thanks for the suggestion, but honestly, that sounds horrible for me right now; looking at the picture of all the people hunched over their desks in an open office. For some background, I've been doing this professionally for 28 years. I've been in the architect/team lead role building software, mostly Greenfield projects in the medical field since 2008. I've shouldered all the responsibility that entails; guiding devs, checking code, working with business directly, making deadlines, project planning, all that.

I plan on doing nothing computer related for the first few months. I need to get healthy again. Once I get healthy I'm gonna spend some time doing deep dives into the new hotness (probably AI), then look for another startup type company who won't shackle creativity and ambition with useless process (scrum).

Or maybe I'll just do some contract work here and there and be semi-retired.