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I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers

leblancfg.com

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Re: I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers

#31

Post by NDlurker »

lagniappe wrote: post #22

>After five years at Shopify, employees get a paid month off to do whatever the hell they want. I took mine in April 2026. Bleak.. Only a month after five years.

I think it's a month in addition to whatever they already get. So that could be pretty good.

I've been with my employer for 12 years and get a total of 296hrs PTO per year. That's probably abnormal now that I think about it and one of the reasons I've stuck around so long. I don't think I've ever used up all my PTO in a year, usually cash out a week or 2 in December.

Re: I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers

#32

Post by MattRix »

lagniappe wrote: post #22

>After five years at Shopify, employees get a paid month off to do whatever the hell they want. I took mine in April 2026. Bleak.. Only a month after five years.

Not sure why that’s bleak? It’s on top of the regular vacation days you get every year. I don’t know of any other company (at least not here in Canada!) that would give you an entire paid month off.

Re: I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers

#33

Post by bee_rider »

MisterTea wrote: post #18
wdrw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in North America (and the author seems to be from Canada), having a company give you any sabbatical at all is pretty rare, and 6+ months is pure fantasy:) And not everyone likes travel, the post actually explains his reasoning pretty well.

> and 6+ months is pure fantasy:) I've seen this before. Had a vendor become helpless after their only engineer took a 6 month sabbatical. Had to cancel orders and switch vendors because they stated "Until the engineer returns, we can not quote a delivery time." Imagine being that company...

Kinda surprising they weren’t able to plan around that, surely The Engineer didn’t just decide randomly to go on a 6 month sabbatical all of a sudden.

Re: I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers

#35

Post by jrflo »

So how does the power meter itself actually work? How do you know the output is accurate? How much power is lost from the measurement due to dampening? How do you know it will hold up to cycling in such an aggressive environment? That's kind of the interesting thing here, but there's no mention of it in the article.

Re: I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers

#37

Post by xcskier56 »

I could see this being used for fitness tests for cross country skiers. A very common exercise is med-ball slams. These aren’t a perfect analog to double poling but definitely close.

Being able to track your one rep max force you can generate could be an interesting metric especially for sprinters

Re: I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers

#38

Post by pdabbadabba »

jrflo wrote: post #35

So how does the power meter itself actually work? How do you know the output is accurate? How much power is lost from the measurement due to dampening? How do you know it will hold up to cycling in such an aggressive environment? That's kind of the interesting thing here, but there's no mention of it in the article.

Agreed. I was disappointed at the overall lack of engineering content in this piece. Lots of general talk about how there were issues and that they were overcome. But what? And how? I feel like most of the content could apply to almost any project.

Re: I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers

#39

Post by zokier »

lagniappe wrote: post #23
0xfaded wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the US and every year I take 17 days off over the July period which works out (with another company holiday) to be 4 continuous weeks. The first year I did it I told my manager "I'm going to take three weeks off, but what do you think about four?". I got my three weeks and made myself indispensable enough to get the four the next year. This stuff can be negotiable if asked for and planned correctly. It won'…

>The Danes do it best, they basically shut down the country for 3 months every summer and have an unspoken agreement that nothing will get done. Is there a skeleton crew to run grocery and fuel?

OP was talking about white-collar jobs, not service industry.

Re: I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers

#40

Post by asib »

ramon156 wrote: post #10

Cool idea, just wondering why you wouldn't travel during a sabbatical. > a paid month off that's not a sabbatical anyway, is it? i thought this was 6-12 months, not one? https://intensity.systems/ is currently unstyled. Post also has some LLM sniffs, so I'm unsure how much of the content is true.

> Cool idea, just wondering why you wouldn't travel during a sabbatical.

Because they didn't want to? A very odd question; people have motivations/interests that aren't yours.

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