Developers need the weekend too

Often as a business owner, I feel I don't get the time to "play" as a developer or designer as I used to when I was just an employee. As things grow, I spend more and more time running it and farm out more work to contractors, etc. My frustrations are often reaslised more when I do my daily reading of blogs and mailing list posts - it seems that everyone else is racing ahead with doing cool stuff, and I'm falling behind. I'm sure a lot of people feel this way when they read about some of the REALLY great stuff guys from around the world are coming up with.

This character trait of mine was recently exposed again when I joined the Flash Lite Yahoo Group mailing list - an excellent (and growing) email list comprising of some really talented people who love their Flash and their mobiles. Some great stuff has already come through my Inbox, and it's been great to join another growing "community".

But I was pleasently surprised this weekend just gone, when the posts stopped. Friday afternoon slowly worked its way around the timezones of the world, and with it came a nice and reassuring silence - developers still know the value of the weekend!

My weekends are sacred, precious time spent away from the computer, phone and clients, and spent with my wife, kids, and friends. Time to watch some football, or be domestic and clean the pool, or wrestle on the floor (!?) ... and not feel like the rest of the world is passing me by. I find it hard though to turn off the thoughts and day-dreaming about work and what's possible for us, so I keep a journal sometimes of ideas that I might come up with, so that I can have a good look on Monday morning when work starts again.

So well done members of the Flash Lite mailing list. Perhaps it was just a quiet weekend for posts, more of an anomaly that the norm, but hopefully it was the sign of people observing an age old tradition of "downtime" - long live the weekend.