It's a job. There are others. If your team is worth its salt its members will be supportive, excited, and will yearn for your return.
With regards to time off in general, writing shit down is my best advice. Get people used to searching some knowledge store before asking you. That way you won't be missed when it comes to explaining to individuals what you've already told fifteen people in separate one on one conversations. You're left to innovate.
The problem was she was scared of dying I couldn't broach the subject with her. She left me a bunch of decisions and no stories for my kids.
I wonder if the type of parent who consents to an interview has probably instilled in you a wonderfully inquisitive attitude. My mum did for me to be fair - she just hid her lack of one from me during my childhood.
In fact she hid lots from me. She was not one for looking back. She said my dad left me and never looked back, and neither did she.
As I went through her stuff I found books and books photos. I found every card I've ever written her. I felt like I didn't know her fully.
If I had my time again, I'd push her for the bits I didn't know. Early relationships. How she felt about becoming a grandmother not 1 or 2 but 3 times. Stories not for me, but for my kids. "this is your nana. Not the pictures or the Xmas toys. The imperfect person who hid her idiosyncrasies and addictions from her son so he'd grow up without them"
My wife and I have no remaining parents, so missed this boat.
Final tip: find out passwords, funeral songs, emails of friends, etc, as its way hard once they've gone.
I do this and it keeps my main inbox nice and clean.
In the case where I have to reply, Google allow you to set up a from email which you can use from your spam trap account. So if you need to send an email as [email protected] it's a few clicks away
The best I've ever had it is using an API gateway that destructured a token into headers. Back end services used MTLS. This meant testing Auth was as simple as adding headers. No server needed to be up, no jwt nonsense needed to be mocked. I can't recommend enough keeping this nonsense at the boundaries.
I usually handle this inside code. Colour output operators make loss difficult to read. An associated commit and message is a sign to developers that the software runs in environments without colour consoles. Finding a way to shoehorn an environment variable into a build pipeline feels like an antipattern.