The Cabin Has Wi-Fi

Last year around this time, my wife and I spent a week overlanding the Georgia Traverse — traveling and camping out of our Jeep along a (mostly) off-pavement route across North Georgia.

We loaded up the Jeep, slept in a rooftop tent, and spent several days doing a pretty convincing imitation of disappearing into the woods.

We also had Starlink.

So perhaps “disappearing” deserves an asterisk.

I seriously considered taking a bass with me.

I didn’t.

There’s a meme about the two wolves inside every software engineer. One wants to build software. The other wants to abandon technology completely and live in a cabin in the woods.

I relate to both of them.

Sometimes literally.

The funny part is that technology isn’t something I only do for work. It’s also one of my hobbies.

At home, I run a Kubernetes cluster, a DMZ with reverse proxies, and VictoriaMetrics and Grafana with custom dashboards. The two places where I spend my time are also connected by a site-to-site VPN, with home automation running across both.

None of this is remotely necessary for home use.

That’s sort of the point.

I like building things. I like figuring out how systems fit together and solving problems that probably didn’t need solving until I noticed them.

The complication is that I also do this professionally.

There are evenings when building something sounds like fun.

And there are evenings when I finish work and would be perfectly happy never seeing another terminal window again.

My Three-Foot Commute

Working from home makes the transition from work to everything else a little strange.

There’s no drive home. No walk from the parking garage. No twenty minutes in the car where the workday slowly becomes something that happened earlier.

Here in Florida, my bass rack sits directly behind me.

So my commute home is sometimes about three feet.

When the workday ends, I’ll turn on the amp, grab whichever bass makes sense for one of the songs I’m working on, open Practice Studio, and play for half an hour or so.

For those thirty minutes, whatever happened at work has to move out of the way.

There’s a song in front of me. Notes to learn. Timing to work on. Transitions that still need attention. It requires a completely different kind of focus.

When I’m finished, I usually put the bass down, find my wife, and we start talking about our day and whatever we’re doing that evening.

Somewhere during that half hour, the workday ended.

Music became another version of the cabin in the woods.

Then the Other Wolf Found the Cabin

Of course, eventually I started building technology for the music hobby too.

Professor Plays Bass started innocently enough. My son had been tracking our recordings in a spreadsheet, and I thought it would be fun to turn it into a web application.

I asked him to decide what features it should have and how he thought it should work, and we built the first version together as a summer project.

It was supposed to be a song catalog.

Before the first production deployment, I was already adding an instrument catalog.

Then came an Effects hub to keep track of the recording-rig settings we used for tone.

Then Practice Studio: Learn, Rehearse, Analyze.

More came after that.

You get the idea.

At its best, the overlap works perfectly. I get to enjoy building something, then later sit down with a bass and actually use what I built. Learn and Rehearse have become part of how I regularly work on songs.

Technology removes some friction.

Music gives the technology a reason to exist.

The trouble starts when I forget which hobby I meant to spend time on.

Planning the Recording Before Learning the Song

Last weekend, I intended to spend some time practicing guitar and bass.

Instead, I started extending the generative AI features inside the Professor Plays Bass application.

Copilot already helps me plan bass recordings. Now that I’ve started recording guitar too, adding guitar support was the obvious next step.

That meant ingesting documentation for the DAW plugins I use, turning it into embeddings the application could search, adding routing logic so different recording questions followed the right workflow, and defining the rules and output I wanted it to produce.

In other words, I was teaching the application how to help me plan a guitar recording.

There was only one minor problem.

I hadn’t started practicing the song yet.

So instead of learning the song I wanted to record, I spent my time extending an AI-assisted recording workflow for a song I did not yet know how to play.

This made complete sense while I was doing it.

That may be the problem.

I don’t think the time was wasted. I was having fun. Building software is one of my hobbies too.

But I did not, in fact, practice guitar that evening.

I practiced software engineering.

The instruments stayed exactly where they were.

Apparently I Don’t Vacation Normally Either

The last time I took PTO is a pretty good example of the same thing.

The guitar course I was taking offered several suggested schedules.

The “Chill Player” schedule stretched the course over 180 days.

The “Fast Track” version took 90.

The “Hardcore” option recommended finishing in 30 days at roughly an hour per day.

I finished it in six days.

While I was on vacation.

Apparently my response to getting time away from work was to compress the hardcore schedule by another 80 percent.

And I had a great time doing it.

That’s probably the clue.

Maybe getting away doesn’t mean doing nothing.

Maybe it means getting to choose what gets my attention.

What I’m Actually Escaping

Technology isn’t the problem. I enjoy it too much to pretend otherwise.

Effort clearly isn’t the problem either. The six-day guitar course takes care of that theory.

What changes when I step away from work is who gets to decide what matters next.

During the workday, responsibilities decide what gets my attention.

Outside of it, I do.

I can build something. Play bass. Learn guitar. Drive a Jeep into the woods and sleep on top of it.

And increasingly, those things don’t stay neatly separated.

This Time, the Bass Is Coming

Next week, my wife and I are heading to the Florida Keys.

We’re staying at a beach house.

And I’m taking a bass.

I’m planning to make a couple of recordings while we’re there. Something by Jimmy Buffett feels almost mandatory. Margaritaville is high on the list, but I haven’t decided yet.

I like not knowing exactly what I’m going to come back with.

Last year, I went into the woods and considered taking an instrument.

This time, the instrument is already part of the plan.

And the next time I disappear into the woods, I’ll probably bring a guitar.

Apparently the two wolves aren’t fighting over the cabin anymore.

They’re figuring out what gear to pack.