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I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers
- Pay08 5mo agoCharpy would like a word.
- 1970-01-01 5mo agoI could see this becoming a tiebreaker or ranking device for lumberjack competitions.
- porkphish 5mo agoNow I have Peter Gabriel in my head.
- engineer_22 5mo agoI'm 13 years into my career and I haven't taken more than 5 days off in a row. That's usually a family reunion. I think 4-8 weeks to recharge and reset would be helpful. What's the research say?
- markus_zhang 5mo agoWish I could do that too. But sabbatical is usually reserved for the elite engineers in elite firms.
- T0Bi 5mo agoOr Europeans (:
- average_r_user 5mo ago"After five years at Shopify, employees get a paid month off to do whatever the hell they want. I took mine in April 2026. Thanks Tobi!"
- ramon156 5mo agoWork culture is so weird. What do you mean, it's reserved for the elites? In my country you get to build your holiday days, so I could totally take a month off if I don't take any other days off this year. Hell, we even have a website to perfectly time it here so you get the most bang-for-your-days. lmao. I will never comprehend this Silicon Valley mindset. You can also be a 10x engineer while drinking a martini in the balkans.
- ilikecakeandpie 5mo agoLives don't exist in vacuums. If I could uproot my close friends and family and we all moved to the same place then I would, but that's not possible. I'm sure it's the same for a lot of people
- ambicapter 5mo agoWhat does uprooting your friends and family have to do with taking a month off once in your life?
- ilikecakeandpie 5mo agoThis was mostly in response to "You can also be a 10x engineer while drinking a martini in the balkans." and is likely a bit of an overreaction to the amount of "just move if you don't like it!" things I've seen. Mobility is a luxury Uprooting family and friends has little to do with taking a month off, but if things don't fall right then one runs the risk of spending their month off mostly by themselves which may or may not be attractive. I've known single teachers complain about this that they have June-August off but no one to spend it with because most of their friends are not teachers
- ilikecakeandpie 5mo agoI'm almost 17 years in and there's been a few times where I had more than 10 days off in a row, and I recently had a four week sabbatical. Anecdotally, it was great and reminded me that retirement has always been the goal.
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoA sabbatical is half a year or a year in germany. NO one would ever say this nonsense of 'four week sabbatical'.
- qwerpy 5mo agoTo me, “work 40+ years and retire when you’re already physically and mentally slow” is the real nonsense. A sabbatical thrown in here and there doesn’t make up for it. I’m grateful that I live somewhere with high enough paying jobs that I can simply quit after just 20 years.
- ilikecakeandpie 5mo agoSabbaticals, paid or not, seem to only be somewhat common in western Europe. I'm glad that you're able to able to experience this but recognize it's quite a privilege globally. It's not just the USA that has this "nonsense"
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoI would agree if the person would live in a 3th world country but not in the country with the highest GDP and comments on a it focused community
- world2vec 5mo agoI take 3 weeks in a row every summer, couldn't live without it.
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoWow thats depressing. I went to japan and took 14 days. I went to Iran and took 14 days. I went to canada and took 4 weeks. I went to Mexico and took 3 weeks. Don't you want to do things with your life? Experience them properly?
- engineer_22 5mo agoI, I, I, I... More to L-I-F-E than "I".
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoMY examples are MINE not YOURs and not LIFE. And I brought it up to show the stark difference. Did i heart your feelings? Are you also only working and calling that a living?
- FinnKuhn 5mo agoMinimum vacation days here in Germany are 20 with many companies offering 30 so the idea that you can't take of at least a couple of weeks for a vacation is just crazy to me. How do you travel and see the world like that?
- darkwater 5mo agoWow. Are you in the US? If so, is this the norm in the US? Pretty depressing... why do you want a SV wage then?
- _spoke_ 5mo agoIs anyone else bothered that this was run through an LLM before publication? The tone is a distraction for me.
- blitzar 5mo ago[flagged]
- foltik 5mo agoyes All the superficial filler leaves a linkedin flavored taste in my mouth. I’d prefer to hear the author’s own voice and thoughts without noise injected to give the illusion of polish.
- bee_rider 5mo agoI thought it was actually quite funny, but I read it as a sarcastic parody of that writing style. I mean there’s no way: > This is the founder story: what I built, why I chose it, and what a month of hardware taught me. The engineering writeup will come later, once I've talked to someone who actually understands IP strategy. is for real, right?
- hdndjsbbs 5mo agoOh this is very real. As someone who lives in Ottawa, Shopify employees are a unique brand of people who think they are tuned into the SV trends but are just huffing their own farts. They're all acting out a small-scale replica of taking peptides and trying to found Uber for Polycules but in a sleepy capital city full of government employees.
- ramon156 5mo agoCool 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/ https://intensity.systems/ is currently unstyled. Post also has some LLM sniffs, so I'm unsure how much of the content is true.
- wdrw 5mo agoAt 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.
- MisterTea 5mo ago> 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...
- bee_rider 5mo agoKinda 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.
- MisterTea 5mo agoIt was a small vendor that was bought up into a larger umbrella parent so I'm sure there was no one at the helm capable of thinking ahead of making this months numbers.
- mikepurvis 5mo ago"Just so you know, our bus number is 1. Now, about your order..."
- lagniappe 5mo ago>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.
- NDlurker 5mo agoI 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.
- MattRix 5mo agoNot 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.
- LanceH 5mo agoIt's "bleak" because some people enjoy making others feel worse about things they have no control over.
- RyanOD 5mo agoNot bleak for most people. I've never worked anywhere that offers an earned chunk of time off like that (besides standard PTO days).
- zeristor 5mo agoLovely idea, always nice to put something together and scratch that itch. What you need is a small weight or something that rises up a pole depending on how hard you hit it, a great visualisation. You could even have a bell at the top, so if this small weight hits it with enough voom it could making a resounding ding sound, so life affirming. Perhaps you could charge a 'apenny a go, and give a prize for those that can do it. Saying Roll up Roll up to passers by in a local fair. "High Striker": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_striker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_striker
- mrandish 5mo agoBased on the headline, this is the first thing I thought of.
- liangyunwuxu 5mo agoYou remind me of a saying: Boring things are actually interesting.
- billbrown 5mo agoHave you met shovelglove? https://shovelglove.com https://shovelglove.com
- jrflo 5mo agoSo 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.
- pdabbadabba 5mo agoAgreed. 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.
- simongr3dal 5mo agoKind of like how “Stuff Made Here” has devolved into mark rober content.
- svnt 5mo agoWell “I badgered claude code for a month and got something that seems to work but I don’t remember how or why” doesn’t make for very compelling reading. We are seeing the rift between actual hacking and vibe-building opening in real time. People always wanted to do this and get the attention. Now they can do it but it isn’t worth the attention.
- Levanta 5mo ago[dead]
- xcskier56 5mo agoI 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
- leblancfg 5mo ago100% agree. And the issue with med-ball slams is they also can just be dropped in a testing setting, and the only power needed to be generated is on the "up" cycle. I wouldn't even trust my own med-ball slam benchmarks from one month to the next, as I'm not confident I slammed them with the same intensity. I'm curious though, wouldn't a Concept2 ski-erg be the best machine for that job? >track your one rep max force [...] especially for sprinters Yeaaah that's the ticket =) One level of abstraction higher: you can think of that 1RM as the leftmost point on the max power curve, i.e. max force you've historically generated, from 5secs all the way to e.g. 60 mins [1]. (1) https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/4-key-uses-for-the-power-duration-model/ https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/4-key-uses-for-the-power-...
- hdndjsbbs 5mo ago> People I look up to include Frank Zappa, Richard Feynman, J.K. Rowling, Peter Norvig, and Geoffrey Hinton. TFW you want to seem intellectual
- leblancfg 5mo agoAye, author here. Pleased it's getting visibility ofc, but ABSOLUTELY not expecting to get traction this early. Please pardon the AI-generated placeholder images and some of the text at https://intensity.systems https://intensity.systems, I'm still very actively working on that.
- hex4def6 5mo agoI'm curious about the units -- watts doesn't really seem right. It seems like joules would make more sense, right?
- andreareina 5mo agoI agree that total work is probably the more relevant metric.
- leblancfg 5mo agoBoth are needed, but for an athlete watts is by far the more useful feedback for training, and following the intended stimulus of workouts. As a workout, "bike 30 km" is vague and meaningless. "bike 30km in 1h" is better, but not specific to the athlete: some have better cardio than others. Most serious cardio workouts are given in zones: "bike 1h at 60-65% of your functional threshold power" [1] – this particular workout would also be known as "zone 2 training session". (1) https://www.trainerroad.com/blog/what-ftp-really-means-to-cyclists/ https://www.trainerroad.com/blog/what-ftp-really-means-to-cy...
- leblancfg 5mo agoThinking back, I should also add: if you're interested in how hard a single hit is, then yes joules! I'm approaching it as a workout, where you're doing dozens of hit. Good idea to have an individual strike joule view to the display though! "carnival mode"
- hermitcrab 5mo agoI believe there are already various, martial arts related, striking meters - to show how hard you are punching/kicking. Isn't this rather similar (but I guess not mounted vertically and calibrated for harder hits)?
- webnrrd2k 5mo agoI'd think that electronic drum heads would provide a good prototype. I really know nothing about it, so I could easily be wrong, but the basics are all there... They are percussive, and the sound varies by how hard they are hit, so there has to be something like a power meter going on. Maybe someone else knows more?
- digitallogic 5mo agoThis is pretty cool! Your note about cycling power meters changing the way you perceive effort matches my experience as well. One other bit from my experience: I'm a runner and a cyclist, and I've always lusted after having cycling style data and prescribed workouts for my running. When Stryd launched I was all in, but... all it gave me was power numbers. It didn't have the tribal knowledge that came with my cycling power meter. Eg - lots of online content about zones, free and paid workouts / plans to target different goals (eg sprinting vs long endurance). It almost seems like any discussion of serious training on a bike comes back to watts. But with the Stryd, all I got was power numbers, and the option to signup for a monthly paid subscription with some training plans that were pretty bare bones. It seems like running power meters just haven't been adopted widely enough for that critical mass of information to emerge. My realization from this is the data is useless without the tribal knowledge of how to use it. So my Stryd sits in a drawer somewhere, and I'm back to running by heart rate.
- andreareina 5mo agoThe equivalent in running is pace, at least on flat ground. I don't know that power would really be useful in running, the biomechanics of running hills is sufficiently different that I question the ability to make an equivalence comparison the same way you do in cycling.
- leblancfg 5mo agoAuthor here: funny you should mention that! Same idea has been on my mind for years at this point. To me, the holy grail of sports training is to have simple but powerful enough models to estimate power data from dozens of movements, and fit various power curves that match real-world training. So much promise there. --- As for Stryd: That's so interesting. I'd imagine a lot of the same parallels to cycling to apply? Once you have your running CP/FTP, I'd imagine you could follow the same cycling training plans (relative to your FTP) for the same intended stimulus. I'm curious though, can you see the Watts/zone/W'bal/etc. values on a watch or something when you're running?
- digitallogic 5mo ago
- lucy_hnatchuk 5mo agodid you find any correlation between strike power and recovery — like, does the pad already give you enough signal to say "don't swing hard tomorrow"?
- leblancfg 5mo agoI didn't look into or find any myself, but "power meter enabled" sports like cycling, rowing, etc. have a way to measure the strain/fatigue of efforts relative to the athlete's fitness (FTP). Same would apply here. There are various methods to measure that strain, e.g. Strava, intervals.icu, TrainerPeak all have their slightly tweaked implementations.