It’s been an interesting half year so far, primarily because I hard launched Evergreen Sewing in February. It’s been off to the races since then.

The charts for Evergreen show revenue doing the tech industry approved Up And To The Right thing, which is nice. It’s not super up (and the “to the right” is a date-based thing out of my contril), and it’s not yet profitable, but it’s encouraging. Expenses are too high relative to gross revenue, so that’s something I’ll need to work on.

As I spend more time with Evergreen matters, I (predictably?) care less about the tech industry in general and open source in specific. I really do feel like both of these have left me, more than I’m leaving them. Every morning I still read all of the headlines in my tech and open source RSS feeds, but lately I find myself wondering how long it’ll be until I delete them. Also, I wonder whether I’ll miss them or feel relief at the removal of noise.

Thus far I’m not hiding the fact that I’m working on Evergreen Sewing, but I’m not broadcasting it, either. Evergreen is canonically plural in all communications, and my overtly public social and blog accounts don’t mention it at all. For now. It’s a way not to discourage people who might want to throw an open source-related contract my way, yes. But it’s also a way to avoid dealing with the questions and other interactions that come with a career change. I don’t have the mental space for that right now.

The business is trending closely toward a full-time endeavour. A few more customers and/or machine sales (more of these, please!) per week and it’s solidly full-time. I find I very much enjoy those days where I get to spend most of my time puzzling over a machine in my workshop (except when the machines and/or my confidence are especially vexing).

So far the people I’ve met in the sewing-related industry are lovely, helpful, and supportive, but I know it’s largely a selection bias thing. I know this because sewing machine repair has its own mailing lists and those cultures are too reminiscent of old school open source lists. As a result, I’ve found myself avoiding the lists. That’s a shame, as I could learn a lot from them, but the mods are all grey-hairs themselves and don’t see anything wrong with the culture. Sometimes I have to stop myself from diving deeply into the list community so I can position myself as a future moderator, where I’ll be in a position to fix the dysfunctional culture. Yes, I could do that. No, I don’t want that burden.

Yeah, so that’s been my life for 2026: Evergreen Sewing. It’s a thing, and I’m making a good go at it.

I didn’t enjoy it all, however. Seven of those titles were DNFs. Two of them got a thumbs down (and probably should’ve been DNFs). Ten of them were only meh. But the other 41 were enjoyable!

Escapism was all the rage in 2025, as only 8 of the books were nonfiction. The remainder were scifi/fantasy. Nearly all of the books were free, courtesy of my adorable local public library.

One of my faves for the year was Swordheart by T. Kingfisher, which was a complete delight to read. The biggest surprise of the year was my not liking The Dreamblood Duology very much, since I typically love everything Jemisin writes.

I still won’t have any reading goals for 2026, and anticipate it’ll end up much like 2025. I’m very much enjoying ending each day with a story, especially now that I’ve trained myself that even if things are getting good, it’s OK to close the book, turn off the light, and go to sleep. The good stuff will still be there for me the next night.

I’m all certified (🥳) for domestic sewing machines now. I have an accountant (local! woman-owned firm!). The (local! woman-owned firm!) graphic designer is working on gen1 of the logo. Evergreen has a business account at the local credit union. The sewing shop downtown has agreed to be my dropoff/pickup location so randos won’t be showing up at my house, but we still need to work out the details of that.

This week—aside from holidaying—will largely be online tasks: learning & starting to set up Odoo, taking product photos so I can start getting these refurbed machines out of my garage, maybe iterating on the placeholder website to add more information and maybe an email signup form. The timing of this works well, since it’s going to be very chilly in the garage this week and I’d rather not spend all day out there.

I’ve started telling more people about it, and thus far they’ve all been very supportive if surprised at what appears to be a sudden turn. OK, fair. Y’all aren’t in my head, so to the outside world it does seem like all this came out of left field when, in truth, I’ve been thinking about it for a few years now. The last time I was unemployed I started considering options I might pursue outside of the tech world. Some of them—like sewing machine repair/resale–I even researched fairly extensively. It’s something that’s adjacent to something I enjoy (fiber arts) without being and therefore ruining that thing. It’s also something for which there’s a good market in the region, which every sewist I’ve spoken to lately has vehemently confirmed. And finally, the opportunity to make a small environmental and cultural difference by keeping machines and clothing out of the dump resonated deeply in me.

When this latest layoff came around, I was therefore somewhat prepared to start the shift from tech to small business owner/operator. It wasn’t my first choice, but the longer I stay on this path the more appealing it feels. I’m still utterly terrified by this massive change, but an increasing amount of evidence is convincing me that it may work.

Despite that, in January I may still put out a call for small consulting/advising projects. Tech still pays oodles better than Evergreen ever will, and at this stage in the business’ development it’ll be very helpful to have a thousand dollars or so coming in from elsewhere every month. I’m realistic about this, though. I’d like to have that little safety cushion, but I don’t expect it’ll actually appear…and it certainly won’t if I don’t put myself out there.

That post was from the day I registered the LLC. Things have gotten very busy in the seventeen or so days since then. For starters, I expect I’ll finish the first (and largest) part of my certification by the end of this week. That’ll be exciting. I may earn a burrito as a reward (because I know how to party).

In the intervening days I’ve also gotten the ball rolling for a business accountant/bookkeeper, and a graphic designer to create a logo. This upcoming week (aside from finishing certification 🤞) I’ll be meeting with that accountant, the graphic designer, and a potential partner store to act as a pickup/dropoff location so I don’t have randos showing up at my home. I’ll finally need to sort out and record inventory on Odoo, as well as create an initial service order process there since the final machine in my certification practicum will be from my first! paying! customer! Oh, and I need to go to the credit union to get Evergreen’s banking set up and squared away. Then create various online accounts (Stripe, Square, Venmo, Paypal) so I can actually accept money.

These are the most immediate tasks, but I also will need to get the business plan details out of my head and onto the page (finally) and start brainstorming the initial marketing campaign. And make the real website. And figure out how I’ll sell the refurbed machines that are building up. And start tracking the benefit corp requirements, since Evergreen’s registered as a benefit LLC. And, and, and… There is no lack of things to do in this household right now.

All of this is leading up to, hopefully, the softest of launches in early January, with the hard launch for…February? I think?

One step in the process may have happened today, or at least started. Sunday is my administrivia day, and often I spend a large portion of the morning reading, filing, and closing the browser tabs that are backlogged during the week. As I was doing that today, I found multiple open tabs related to the tech and/or open source worlds and…I just closed them unread.

This techxit strategy thing, as good as I’m sure it eventually will be for my mental health, is currently causing a massive identity crisis. Who am I if I’m no longer doing the things for which I’m well known and have earned respect over these many years? How will I see my friends if I’m not traveling the world to present at conferences? Are people going to forget me because I’m no longer “useful” to them? And what in the hell am I doing leaving tech right after publishing a (humblebrag) Very Good Book? A book that isn’t selling hardly at all (from what little I can tell) and could use a LOT work to promote? Am I just walking away from everything? Really?

This has all been a massive drag on getting any forward momentum on Evergreen. Closing those tabs today show that while I can still stay informed (RSS feeds are faboo), I have given myself permission not to care about every little thing in the open source world. I told myself that before, but now my brain finally may have started believing it, since closing those tabs unread actually felt good. With each one, a little cognitive burden fell from the stack to lie abandoned on the wayside.

I still have a lot of questions to resolve in that massive identity crisis, but seeing some progress there is, as usually’s the case, motivating. And, of course, it’s ever so helpful to free up a little bit more mental space for the all too real challenge of starting a business in a totally different industry.

Since then I’ve continued to apply to and be rejected (or, more often, ignored) by a worryingly large number of jobs. These dismal results have coloured my thoughts about that techxit strategy idea.

It’s clear now that whether or not I was going to leave tech, it’s likely left me. I can’t ignore the reality that my unemployment benefits will run out before this economy corrects and jobs start appearing again.

Thankfully, as I mentioned in August, I was already actively investigating options. It may be too little, too late, but at least I’m not caught completely flat-footed.

Today I took moved those investigations into the “really truly a real thing, honest” stage by creating a new LLC, sketching out some business plan thoughts, creating a placeholder website, and setting up email. You know, the things I’m already comfortable doing.

Anyway, say hello to Evergreen Sewing. It’s not launched yet, but it will at some point in the next few months.

Now comes the uncomfortable part, which I’ll have to manage while simultaneously doing job hunt things, at least for a little bit. Even after that, I’ll likely remain open to tech jobs…but I’ll keep working on Evergreen. I don’t intend to rely solely on the tech industry ever again if I can help it.

I’m not going to be loud about this until I have something to shout about (like finishing the sewing machine repair certification I’ve been working on), but taking this next step will help me actually continue with this hairbrained idea.

I’ve created a new list in Reminders.app called One Thing. This is the one thing that I would like to have done by the end of the week. If needed, I break down the One Thing into smaller tasks and assign them throughout the week. Each Wednesday I review the One Thing to see whether I’m on track or whether adjustments are needed. Each Sunday I review and reset the One Thing for the next week.

As I live and die by my todo lists and calendar, keeping the One Thing front and centre in an app I check dozens of times a day should theoretically help me whittle away at those ellusive tasks. It’ll also keep me from taking on too much, trying to tackle several of those slippery things at a time. Time-boxing it to a week gives me the flexibility I need as priorities and resources shift around.

Will it work? I dunno! But I’ll find out!

The first roadblock was around July 2021, when I both had to move house and start a new job (Wipro). Totally understandable and unavoidable stuff, and not really a big delay.

2022 wasn’t especially productive, largely due to that job, but I did get the first third of the book written. Then, at the end of that year, came the first big blocker: my editor (and dear friend) had to step away from the project. It was the right thing for him to do and I entirely support the decision. It did lead to a delay though, as I waited to meet with my new editor.

She started in January 2023. I let her know that I needed some space to focus and pound through some chapters and that I’d ping her when I’d written enough to feel OK about my progress. In April I let her know that the second third of the book was done and ready for review. In May she stepped away from the project for personal reasons. The second third remained unedited.

To paraphrase Wilde, to lose one editor may be considered a misfortune; to lose two…

My next (and final) editor wouldn’t be available until July. I didn’t want to get too far ahead of her, so I put all writing on hold until she had the chance to start and get caught up. She’d done that by mid-August, and then it was time to start the first tech review (send to about twelve people for feedbacK), then publisher review, and then finally the beta (early) release in mid-October. Things were moving! So much progress!

There were seven beta versions in all and the book was content complete and out for its second round of tech review in May of 2024. I’d addressed all tech review feedback by July. The book was now more or less out of my hands, with the next steps—copy editing, layout, indexing—managed by the publisher.

At this point all target dates started shifting wildly and weren’t being communicated to my editor (who naturally didn’t have information to share with me).

I didn’t receive copy edits until January of 2025 and it resulted in my having an argument with the publisher about the removal of some text. I won’t go into details, but in correspondence with my editor I summarised it as “some sort of privileged old white dude ‘no politics’ both-sidesism bullshit platitudes”. Plus, hello, January?? wtaf.

In March I was having to nudge people to get any sort of word about when the book would go through indexing and layout. Also in March, people were reporting that the book was already available from Amazon. As far as I knew, it wasn’t even ready to be printed. The publisher told my editor and me that the book would be out in April.

It turns out the book was done but no one had told me. They also hadn’t told me that the publisher was changing distributors. This was leading to some shops (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) having the book while others still weren’t showing it as in print.

Finally, the publisher announced it as in print on April 10th. I wasn’t told in advance that this was going to happen, so I pretty much missed my own book’s birthday. Meanwhile, people out there in the world had posted pictures of their own copies that had arrived weeks prior.

Fast forward to today, in October. According to the dashboard in the author portal, my book has sold zero hard copies. None. Which is, of course, inaccurate. But the new distributor still hasn’t paid out my publisher, who won’t update the dashboard until they’re paid. They also won’t pay out any royalties to the authors. Not all of their authors are caught in this limbo, only a few of us.

Having to deal with this on top of so many delays is completely demotivating. It’s a good book, with a lot of valuable information that’s well-presented, and I can’t even bring myself to promote it. I’m just sick of the entire ordeal. Dealing with all this nonsense sapped my energy and left me dry. At the same time, I’m carrying around this deep sadness that all that work feels like it’s coming to nothing and that my book isn’t going to be the helpful resource that I’d hoped.

Anyway, that’s the tale of the cursed book. I’ve finally captured it so I can revisit this story the next time I get it into my head that maybe writing a book would be a good idea.

Well, yeah. It is. And we all look really good in golden handcuffs, but that doesn’t mean we like it.

Tech is more capricious than any other industry with which I’ve worked (unfortunately, doing tech things). It’s far from a stable situation. You cannot (and should not) rely on your job existing in a year, and that adds a great deal of stress to an industry that already glamourises overwork.

If you work at the level I do, you also get to watch a lot of extremely poor business decisions as they’re happening. These decisions don’t typically have a lot of logic or strategy behind them, and they impact the welfare of not only employees but also customers of the business. Even if you get to provide advice (as I do), there’s not usually a lot you can do to stop these strategic and operational mistakes. It’s demoralising in many ways.

So, yeah, many of us would like to get out if we can. In the past few years I’ve started to admit that I should be counting myself in that number. Unfortunately, unlike most folks I don’t have a partner on whom I can rely for another income, which makes my golden handcuffs fit more tightly than usual. It also means that when someone rips those handcuffs away—say, by laying me off—it hurts a lot more.

This most recent layoff is another opportunity for me to consider my techxit strategy. Is it even possible for me to leave tech? What would I do instead?

For a change, I’m legitimately considering these questions rather than letting them cross my thoughts, tank my mood, and disappear. I’ve come up with some possible options (which I’m not willing to share yet) and am actively investigating one so far. Even if it works out, I don’t expect it’d be something to which I could switch full time, at least not immediately, but it could provide some sort of a safety net. Maybe.

Anyway, I’m looking into it rather than simply sitting around wringing my hands, fretting, and complaining about the state of the industry.

After some thinking, I realised that the main blocker was writing the reviews for the books. Further thinking revealed that while the reviews are fine, they’re not as important to me as the list of read titles itself. So to lower the barrier to entry, it’s now purely list and is a /read slashpage.

Which leaves an open question of what to do with this space. I hadn’t intended for it to become a reference for what books I’ve read, after all, and I do want to keep it going in some way.

My friend John has been doing weeknotes, which I enjoy reading and is something I could try (or I could accomplish the same thing by updating my /now page, which I’ve already done at least once).

Basically I’m back where I started before the book reviews gave me something to post. I’ll be doing more thinking to consider what I’d like this site to be and why. More news as I have it.

A couple months ago, while looking for something entirely different, I ended up accidentally impulse buying a bunch of Kate’s books from Biblio. Oops?

Do I need the information in this book? No, I really don’t. I’m a seasoned knitter who’s not afraid to stretch my skills with unfamiliar techniques. This book didn’t hold any new information for me in that way.

I still enjoyed it, though. Atherly’s writing is always clear, friendly, and supportive. Even though I know the information in the book, it never hurts to get a refresher. And, bonus, there’s a toy mousie knitting pattern in there as a practice project for increases/decreases. Which means your cat would like you to buy this book.

Even if you don’t have a cat, if you’re interested in learning more about knitting, you can never go wrong with picking up a book by Kate Atherly and this one is no exception.