Nearly 4 years ago to the day I blogged about a series of life changes that shaped how a lot my time would be spent in the forthcoming years. My oldest was approaching his first birthday, we had purchased our first home and I had just started my new role leading our engineering team at Salesforce.org. It was most certainly the start to what would be a crazy number of years in my life.

Henrik and Rupert enjoying a welcome basket from my new team!

Fast forward to May 2021 and while there are many things that are the same (we’re still in our same home in Port Moody!), lots has changed. The boys are going to be age 5 and 3, we’re on the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic and, most excitingly, I’m advancing my career and trying something new! This week I started a new role at Salesforce with a focus on engineering skills and people development for our technology teams.

I’m excited to take this next step in my career. During my growth as a technical leader I have always gravitated and found interest in the people development aspect of management and I’m thrilled to be able to focus more of my energy on these types of initiatives for other leaders in the industry.

In addition to taking on this new role, I’m committing to posting more content on my Twitter profile about engineering and technical leadership. Be sure to give me a follow or check out my Feed for more information!

It think we can all agree that the start of 2021 has been much like most of 2020. With so much going on in the world, it’s hard to keep your mental health stable and focus your energy on what truly matters.

Winter walks with the boys have been great for mental health!

2020 was a transformational year for me, one in which I’ve blogged extensively on:

• Managing mental health and wellbeing during a pandemic

• Taking a sabbatical and stepping away from work

• Dealing with ongoing injuries and surgeries

I went through a lot of growth last year, both personally and professionally. I setup systems in my life that helped me foster that growth. I read more. I took online courses. I focused on my fitness and wellbeing. I invested a significant amount of my time and energy focused on myself, my achievements and ultimately scratched an everlasting itch to always be getting shit done.

As 2021 has progressed and, in particular, as my work has become more demanding and intense, I’ve taken a bit of a different approach.

I’ve been doing a whole lot of nothing.

This isn’t to say that I’ve been phoning it in. In fact I find myself more engaged in my work these days and I’m really enjoying the challenges that it provides. But beyond that, and to act as a counter-balance, I’ve been focusing on spending a lot of down time at the end of my day and on weekends. No reading, no writing, no courses, no deliberate growth activity. Just hanging out - going out for walks, watching TV & sports, playing video games and spending time with the family.

Brené Brown has blogged, written and podcasted (is that a word?) extensively on the concept of “play” - time within your life where you do things with no particular end goal or achievement. It’s been refreshing to apply some of these techniques to my life and has an added benefit of connecting closer with my kids.

One thing that I haven’t compromised is my physical and mental fitness. I still meditate every day. I get at least 60 mins of activity each morning before my day starts. But what I have done is put more downtime into my exercise. For example, a few times a week I only do yoga and stretching to allow my body to relax, rest and recover.

There is a part of me that’s concerned that with such large investment in my growth in 2020, that I’m starting to slow down. Life is short! But ultimately I feel growth and learning comes in waves and there will be a time again soon in which I have that lust for personal growth again. Today I was inspired to write this blog post, so perhaps I’m already starting to turn a corner!

But until then, I plan to continue to have a lot of unstructured downtime with my family and “play” more. For your own mental health, I suggest you do the same!

Happy New Year!

During my holiday break I’ve been lucky enough to discover a handful of my old data CD’s from my high school IT classes. Going through the content of these discs has been an incredible throwback for me, consisting of files and content from various Information Technology, Computer Science and Drafting courses from 20+ years ago.

One of my most exciting discoveries was a Time Capsule site that I created shortly after Y2K. I recall doing this as part of one of my IT classes as one of the first webpages I ever created. This was meaningful for me for a few reasons:

• I loved being able to take a look at a small snippet of my code and how I structured the site, the banner I created (using one of those banner-generating sites from back in the day), the images I likely “borrowed” from another page. I even went in and made a few changes to have it format more properly in modern browsers!

• The content of the page was also fun to look back at. It highlights some of the biggest moments of my childhood life. It also gave me comfort knowing that many parts of my childhood are still prominent to me, including my love for music (many of the bands listed I still love!) as well as my love for sports.

I wanted to post this online and after researching on the easiest way to host a single page (AWS, Google Cloud, etc.) I chose Github Pages which worked out quite well. You can visit the site at dylanhansen.github.io/2000timecapsule and can also see the source code here. Please don’t judge my 20-year-old imlpementation!

This did trigger for me a though around creating a 2020 Time Capsule, and it might be something I do with my children in the next few weeks. For now, I’ll continue to blog more as something I can look back on many years down the line, as well as continue to take lots of photos of my life experiences!