Taking a career break can feel like pressing pause on professional growth. But what if that pause button actually unlocks unexpected opportunities for learning and development? That’s exactly what I discovered during my year as a full-time parent.
When my wife and I welcomed our son, I voluntarily stepped away from my software engineering career to focus on our growing family. While I knew this transition would be challenging, I was determined to still continuously flex by professional “muscles”. With a newborn’s schedule dictating my days, I needed to get creative about how to use my time effectively.
What emerged was a year-long journey of structured learning, skill-building, and personal development—all orchestrated around nap times and wake windows. From completing my Master’s degree to diving deep into cloud certifications, and from building a home lab to exploring the frontiers of AI, this “pause” became anything but static.
In this post, I’ll share how I turned fragments of time into foundations for growth, proving that career breaks don’t have to mean career stagnation. Whether you’re a parent considering a similar path or someone looking to maximize learning opportunities in constrained circumstances, I hope my experience offers both practical insights and inspiration.
Let’s dive into how I transformed my year of “pause” into a year of purposeful growth.
Nap Time Management: The Power of Time Blocking
Life with a newborn is dictated by two types of time periods: nap times and wake windows. Wake windows are all about bonding, tummy time, and making funny faces. Nap times? That’s when I switched gears to engineer “growth windows” for myself. Essentially, due to the nature of taking care of a baby, my time management fit perfectly with a time blocking time management approach.
To make sure I used these times in the best way for both of us, I started each week by creating a calendar with the expected napping and waking time blocks and planned what I’d like to do during each of those times (fortunately, we have a pretty consistent and reliable sleeper).
This approach was especially beneficial because wake windows and nap times tend to be rather short. By already having an assigned activity going into the brief two-hour window ahead of me, I was able to avoid wasting time due to context switching or trying to figure out how I’d like to spend that time.
December to April: Full-time Dad, Part-time Student
Finishing My Master’s of Science in Analytics at Georgia Tech
The immediate use of any ‘free’ time went straight to finishing the last semester of my Master’s degree! The final semester featured a 6-credit capstone project with a real-world company (sadly, under NDA, so I can’t spill the details). Balancing schoolwork with parenting wasn’t a walk in the park, but the experience strengthened my project management and problem-solving muscles.
If you’d like to learn more about other projects during this program, check out Projects While Completing Master’s of Science in Analytics at Georgia Tech.
Catching Up on Life
After the whirlwind of bringing home our new roommate, we were behind on a lot of aspects of our day-to-day life. I had a honey-do list the length of the Magna Carta and tackled it piece-by-piece until we reach a bit of stability. From remodeling closets to building a playroom to childproofing every nook and cranny of the home.
I still found some extra time to set up the foundation for areas I wanted to build on in the future:
Home Assistant
One of my favorite hobbies is home automation through Home Assistant (HA). HA is an open-source, home automation software to integrate all of your smart devices into a single platform and implement custom automations, such as my Smart Garage with Shelly 1.
It is the perfect intersection between my interest in technology and solving micro-problems in my day-to-day life. To get stared, I set up my own home lab and started building. This allowed me to get hands-on experience with hardware and local networking concepts. In the future, I’ll be able to expand my suite of applications through containers running self-hosted services.
April to August: Signed, Sealed, Certified!
The honey-do list was now a honey-done list. I knew my time as a full-time parent was finite, so from here on out I wanted to make sure I positioned myself to continue to be a strong candidate when re-entering the workforce.
While I had spent the past 7 years working in software, I never received formal education or certification on most topics. This meant I knew the self-taught areas within my domain very well, but I didn’t have the breadth that someone would see over the years of a software engineering degree. My goal was to get the certification stamp that proved my knowledge where I had experience and to expose myself to new areas of the system design world.
Creating a Personal Website
My first step was to create a place where I could document everything I was learning for my own future reference. I had learned about the concept of learning publicly, so a website seemed like the perfect solution. I originally explored building a website using AWS Lightsail, but then I discovered Obsidian Publish and that is where we are today.
Certifications
AWS SAA-C03 Certification
My professional experience with AWS covered DynamoDB, EC2, S3, and some general IAM strategies, but I needed to sharpen myself across the entire ecosystem before sitting for a certification exam. I took Adrian Cantrill’s AWS SAA-C03 course to prepare for the exam and highly recommend it. This course paired with the Tutorials Dojo practice exams gives everything you need to pass with flying colors!
Databricks Certification
For Databricks, I took a quick refresher course and followed these steps: Just got certified! - Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate : r/dataengineering
Growing Knowledge Breadth
My favorite part of the past year was learning about areas of software engineering I didn’t get exposure to in my past jobs. I used two primary resources to get a general understanding of all the various topics to consider and build out a Technical Mind Map.
Data Structures and Algorithms Refresh via Leetcode
The Leetcode Explore Cards provided an overview of useful data structures and algorithms to use in the future. It was great being able to do Leetcode practice problems for each topic to not only understand the theory, but actually learn how to implement and use each of them.
System Design Crash Course: Alex Xu’s System Design Interview
Then, for broader system design concepts I read System Design Interview – An insider’s guide by Alex Xu. My work occurred in the backend 95% of the time, so this was especially useful in getting exposure to some frontend concepts, like a Content Delivery Network (CDN), Frontend Performance Improvements, and others.
August to December: Building Depth and Building Apps
After getting a base layer of knowledge that took me out of my work experience comfort zone, I wanted to build some depths on these topics through further reading and hands-on experience.
Building Depth
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
It seemed to be a recurring theme in every post on the topic of system design to read Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann. And I must say - it did not disappoint. I think it does a great job covering incredible breadth with some moderate depth while explaining topics clearly and concisely. Oh, and it does have a little bit of snarkiness in discussing technology architecture, which I think add a little fun to a field full of such strong opinions.
Hello Interview
Another resource I heavily used during this time is Hello Interview. I’ve yet to see anyone else breakdown technical topics in such a smooth, methodical manner that builds up very intuitively with constant reminders of the real world impacts of different system components and design decisions. I’ve especially enjoyed their deep-dives and anything on their YouTube channel.
Building Apps
Auction AId
The reward for all my new learning is I get to start building full-stack development projects! My first project was Auction AId Release 1.0 - A New Tool for Fantasy Football Auction Drafts.
Auction AId will address several challenges currently seen in auction drafts:
- Gap in Auction Draft Tooling Support - most leagues use a snake draft format over auction drafts. I’d estimate less than 20% use the auction approach. This has led to a giant gap in tools that cater specifically to auction drafts.
- Opportunity to Leverage League-specific Data - most (if not all tools) leverage industry experts or cross-league data for their insights. This approach makes sense as most fantasy football player do not play in leagues that span many years. As leagues are starting to age, though, the data around league owner tendencies is starting to grow, which makes it ripe for insights.
- Dynamic Projection Updates - for the current available static tooling, the data you enter the draft with is the data you are stuck with. It does not react to the events of the draft. A dynamic tool that updates projected values based on the draft in real-time will add another advantage over other tools.
The first release is available on GitHub here and I’m already looking forward to adding new enhancements.
December: My Own AI Revolution
One year into being a full-time parent and I entered a long Decemer where I knew my time to join the workforce was rapidly approaching. We were ready to send our son to daycare, which means I’ll be able to return to work! With only a short few weeks left, I wanted to dive deep into the latest in the ‘AI Revolution’, while continuing to learn more about system design.
GenAI
Like many others, I heard about 126,235,231 different terms related to AI. My goal was to sift through all these terms and pull together a true understanding of how the latest AI trends work under the hood. I documented this as part of my From Buzz to Building - Introduction to GenAI for Developers - Part 1 - Key Concepts blog post.
I am still working on a few projects that apply these concepts, so keep an eye out for future posts on these topics! If you want to stay up-to-date on my journey, you can subscribe to my Substack here.
Returning to Work!
What a year! While I’ll miss the extra time with my son, I’m beyond excited to rejoin the workforce armed with new skills, certifications, and a renewed passion for learning. This year reminded me that growth doesn’t stop just because you’ve paused your career. Sometimes, a pause is exactly what you need to hit “play” on new possibilities.
Like the timeline at the start? It was created using Markwhen. The original file for my timeline can be found here: career-on-pause-growth-on-play-timeline.mw.mw
#blog-post #technical-project #technical-deep-dive