Six Months of Hiking: What the Mountains Taught Me
Started as a way to get away from screens. Ended up being the best debugging environment I've found.
Six months ago I started hiking. Not seriously — just occasional day hikes around Luzon, nothing technical. But it's become a fixture in my life in a way I didn't expect.
Why I started
Burnout. The honest answer. Long project cycles, a lot of async communication, and a screen that never fully turns off. A friend suggested Mt. Batulao as a weekend reset and I figured, why not.
What surprised me
You can't multitask on a trail. The path demands just enough attention that you can't scroll or context-switch, but not so much that you can't think. It's become my best environment for working through hard problems — not actively, but in that background processing way where solutions arrive on their own.
I've made three significant architecture decisions on trails. Zero on my couch.
The Philippines angle
We're spoiled here. Within a few hours of Manila you have Batulao, Maculot, Pinatubo, Pulag. Different difficulties, different landscapes. Pulag in January, above the clouds at 4am, is something I can't describe in a way that does it justice.
Next up
Planning to try diving in Tubbataha. The hobby-collecting continues — there's something deliberate about learning things that require full presence. The Philippines is an excellent place to run that experiment.