I haven't felt any urge to tinker with my Linux setup in months. This after spending much of the spring and into summer furiously and obsessively trying every PC out there to find the perfect replacement for the Mac, diving deep with Ubuntu, and codifying my findings in the Omakub project. But now it's done, and I'm left enjoying the Apple-free spoils of a new, better place without any recurring work.

It was the same experience getting out of the cloud. For months, I spent all my time building Kamal, examining server components, and plotting our path. But then we did it, and then it was done. 

Ditto with Rails 8. Huge push to get the Solid Trifecta to line up with a release that included Propshaft and the authentication generator, and the rest of all the amazing steps forward I covered in the Rails World keynote. Now that's done too, and all new Rails apps enjoy the compressed complexity.

At the company level, most of our work is a marathon. That's how you stay in business for twenty years and beyond. By sticking with it. But at the executive level, almost all big leaps forward are sprints inspired by a hunch. They have to be sprints, because the level of intensity required to get that hunch over the hill is just too high to sustain for long (unless, I guess, you're Elon!).

That to me is the best argument for making sure my plate isn't full of half-eaten commitments. That my calendar isn't clogged with an endless ream of recurring meetings. Such that my mind remains an open, blank slate when one of those obsessive opportunities flutter by.

See, I've come to accept that my best work is a series of sprints punctuated by periods of wandering. It was a knee-jerk protest to the stultifying and abusive App Store bureaucracy that eventually lead me to Linux. And it was discovering Linux that lead to Omakub, and making the open source operating system the default for new technical staff at 37signals. 

It was a deep dive into Docker, originally without any clear mission beyond curiosity, that lead to Kamal, and our path out of the cloud. Oh, and getting enamored by the speed of Gen 4 SSDs was what planted the seed for the Solid Trifecta. 

I couldn't have planned any of this even if I wanted to. But I also don't want to. There are few things more satisfying to me than following a hunch and seeing where it leads, without a commitment to a specific, final destination.

It's a little like writing. Half the joy of composing these paragraphs come from discovering the arguments as the piece develops. Every essay starts with a hunch, but the final shape is rarely clear until the mind has been left to wrestle with the words for a while.

So that's why my answer to the usual question of "what's next?": I don't know! Because if I did, I'd already be half-way done doing it. And then it wouldn't really be next, it'd be now.

Finding the next now is the art of wandering, and wandering well takes practice and patience. Don't rush it.