It Was Time to Take a Break from WordPress for a While but Keep Blogging about Software Development and Support

In October 2015, I found something that I had deemed important, such that it would probably take my time away from WordPress for months. I thought I’d need to stop participating to WordPress forums and WordPress chat.

Transcript in the Slack archives from when I wrote that I had to take a break from WordPress. https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/...458 (A Slack account is required – see: https://make.wordpress.org/chat )

I had worried that career development would suffer during this 90 days. I wouldn’t be learning via the WordPress community participation.

Even so, I felt I’d still be learning in other ways. I felt I’d keep talking to colleagues via other channels and meet new friends and colleagues along the way. And I felt that I might learn things and do things that I’d continue blogging about on my Software Support and Development Engineer -related professional blog.

It immediately turned out that it was in a sense liberating to clear my calendar of the weight of the WordPress “school”. Then immediately I felt weird that I had thought WordPress activities (“school”) was highly important, but now that I had started to think something else was more important, that I could drop WordPress like that. Sort of emotional – sort of made me want to laugh, and cry.

At the same time I felt liberated, because that was the underlying motivation to learn about WordPress in the first place — as a way to learn about Software Support and Development Engineer -related topics.

I wound this down by doing a couple of things: Took WordPress reminders off my calendar, and removed WordPress bookmarks from my browser.

I had thought it was like the then-current home page of http://blog.josemcastaneda.com/ (Jose M Castaneda blog)

“…I am a WordPress fanatic. I love to learn new things and love to share my learnings. I have always loved open source and have a love-hate relationship with it. I hate how much I love it, sometimes. …”

I thought maybe it had turned out that I too sometimes hated how much I loved WordPress, and maybe that’s why there was some relief in the idea of taking a break from it for some time.

That’s what happened in October 2015 when I had found something that I had deemed important, such that it would probably take my time away from WordPress for months. I stopped WordPress community participation for a while. It felt sad yet liberating. And I re-discovered the essence of why I do WordPress as a type of “school” in the first place — to learn about Software Development and Support.

Note: This post was pre-published on 2016-09-09.

Note: This post was re-pre-published on 2016-10-28.

[2019 edit: Moved to: https://i̶n̶v̶e̶s̶t̶o̶r̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶r̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/2016/... .html.]