Somehow six months of parental leave have passed, and I'm now facing my return to work. At times it felt long, and now it feels short enough that I think, "already?" With my return ahead of me, I'd like to reflect on the thoughts I had as a developer and on how I spent my parental leave.
Ahead of Parental Leave
When I first planned my parental leave and told my colleagues, "I'm going on parental leave," I felt strangely excited. Was it because of the baby I'd soon meet? Or was it the thrilling feeling of heading off on a long vacation to some resort?
The truth is, before my parental leave began, the team I belonged to was facing a big project. The schedule looked tight and I was worried about the colleagues staying behind, but with the thought that it wouldn't be my task anyway—and since it was work I didn't much want to do—I think a part of me also felt relieved. Around the time I was going from meeting to meeting ahead of the big project, saying worried words to my colleagues, a server developer I work with said, "Your baby's going to be here soon… If it were me, I could do a project like this two or three more times." Looking back now, I think at the time I didn't fully grasp what those words meant and let them pass as a joke.
Goals During Parental Leave
Once my parental leave began, I set a few goals. To study here and there and put up three blog posts, even simple ones, and to organize the career I'd kept putting off and build a portfolio of my own. Using little pockets of free time, I wrote a piece organizing "login and user authentication methods," which I'd wanted to sort out at least once, and I organized "front-end architecture & design competency," which the AI had recommended.
Then, after the first 100 days passed, a period came when my wife could manage the baby on her own to some extent. Around that time I was invited to a chicken-and-beer get-together with colleagues and had a gathering for the first time in a while, and as we chatted about this and that, I learned the news that Ingress NGINX was being discontinued. After the gathering, I organized my notes on "Ingress NGINX and the Gateway API," and what struck me from that conversation with developers after so long was the feeling that I was already falling behind. Even the blog post I organized back then, I think I studied and put together as if chased by something. But this feeling gradually faded as I spent my days at war with the baby. In the end, the portfolio organizing my career so far turned out in such a state that I thought I'd have to redo it, and it dissolved into a daily routine of alternating between childcare and rest.
Claude Code?
Three months into my parental leave, talk of Claude Code started showing up more and more on social media, YouTube, and developers' posts. Among my developer friends, too, there was talk about whether we were using Claude Code. As someone who, before my leave, had used ChatGPT and Cursor and gotten roughly the level of a coding assistant out of them, I didn't take much interest, thinking only that something new must have come out again. But at the next chicken-and-beer get-together with colleagues, when I heard that everyone was using Claude Code and that their way of working had completely changed from before, I was filled with anxiety, thinking about the parental leave I still had left.
The Remaining Parental Leave
I figured that to adapt even a little faster when I return to work, I should at least learn how to use Claude Code. I looked into how it works by reading the official Claude Code docs and related posts, and I paid for the Pro plan. I tried it out this way and that to learn how to use it, and I experimented with features that let you extend Claude Code more usefully, such as Skills, Hooks, Subagents, and MCP. As I explored these features, I was curious about the forms in which my current organization was using them, and it occurred to me that after returning I could adapt to work by getting to know these features one by one.
Since then I've been using Claude Code to refactor my blog, and I'm building a coin trader system and a 2D pixel game. Because I'm doing actual creative work rather than simple refactoring, the tokens vanished in an instant, and right now I'm spending all my tokens on building the 2D pixel game. The game is being developed with the Godot engine, and I'm entrusting all of the work entirely to the AI. As a result, when I've used up all my tokens, I—having no understanding whatsoever of the Godot engine—end up just waiting for the tokens to recharge. Going through this made me wonder: if I keep entrusting work entirely to the AI at the company too, will I ever be able to call myself a developer someday? And if an incident occurs or a hotfix deployment is needed and a situation arises where I can't use the AI—if I can't handle that situation, can I really be called the kind of developer the company needs?
Ahead of Returning to Work
Somehow this ended up being mostly about Claude Code. That's how much—short as the time was—the anxiety Claude Code gives me loomed larger than anything else. Looking back on the things I've been through, I did bits and pieces here and there, but I'm left with the regret of "I should have worked harder." There are about 10 days left until I return, but I've resolved to spend even these remaining 10 days polishing my jumbled-up portfolio again and preparing hard for my return. And if a day ever comes when I take another parental leave, I hope to remember this same regret and to be someone who works a little harder toward something.
"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing." - Walt Disney -