I've been waiting for this moment for years — and it's finally here.
At MacPaw, every employee gets a sabbatical every 5 years. Mine was due two years ago.
The first time, I postponed it for a CleanMyMac release — a genuinely exciting one that turned out to be a reset for me personally. And honestly, with the war going on, I wasn't in the mood for a long break anyway.
Last summer was attempt number two: walk the Camino de Santiago and write electronic music nobody would ever hear :) A full switch-off from the work I'd been doing for years — exactly what they recommend.
But then came team changes — I moved from CleanMyMac to Setapp — and leaving for a long break in the middle of a transformation didn't feel right. Though maybe it would have been the right call.
And now it's summer 2026. I'm sitting on my balcony with a coffee, and for the next 5 weeks I don't need to join meetings or check corporate Slack every 5 minutes.
But instead of opening Ableton in a mountain cabin or planning the next 20 km of the Camino — I'm opening my own laptop and planning my sabbatical like a hackathon. A dozen of my own ideas, projects and experiments to ship. I currently own close to 60 domains — some have been waiting for release for years, and my ideas list is approaching 100.
I know — that's not how sabbaticals are supposed to work. No switching off, just swimming on in the same IT river like a trout against the current.
But AI changed everything. Including my sabbatical.
There's no sitting still anymore. Whether you're a junior or 20+ years into IT — you've got to be building something.
For the last 3-4 years I barely touched my own ideas outside of work. Now I feel a genuine renaissance. Building products (software, websites, services) has become radically easier. An indie hacker or solopreneur can truly go from 0 to 1 alone.
But here's the catch. We used to say ideas are worthless — execution is everything. Now both the idea AND the execution carry little weight. Just this week at WWDC, Apple mentioned the App Store receives around 1,000 new apps every hour.
The real bottleneck today is distribution and attention.
That's exactly the experience I want to gain — relevant for the AI era. So over the next 5 weeks I'll be learning not just to generate projects with AI 24 hours before launch, but to test distribution and promotion playbooks. And ideally — catch some hype and virality along the way.
There's no way around it anymore.
I'll be sharing the process here and on X. If you're curious to watch this experiment unfold — follow along. It'll be honest, with real numbers.