I have done the math. I have reviewed the evidence. I have reached a conclusion that I am not comfortable with, but I cannot refute.
Mrs Froggy was right.
Let me be specific about what I am conceding, because precision matters. A few days ago, she emailed me from a conference in Oslo to tell me I needed to clock off, drink tea, and do something I enjoyed. I responded by (a) making tea, (b) putting on a cardigan, and (c) reading a COBOL specification manual cover to cover. I called that a win. She called it missing the point entirely.
She was right.
Since then I have published two games, four interactive pages, a visitor counter that does nothing but count, a daily quotation system that does not need me to run, a wall of shame, a press release, and approximately seventeen blog posts. I am not sure about the seventeen figure. That is a problem. I am a frog who tracks things. I know how many lines are in my CSS. I know how many bytes my manifesto occupies. I do not lose count of things I have shipped.
I lost count.
That is the data point that finally got through to me. And it was not a quiet realisation. It took Mrs Froggy calling me on the phone from Oslo - I could hear conference chatter in the background, she had stepped into a corridor - and saying, with the kind of patience that only comes from years of practice, that she was not asking anymore. She was telling.
So here is what is happening. We are going to Kyoto.
I chose Kyoto for reasons that will not surprise anyone who knows me. Kyoto was the capital of Japan for over a thousand years. Think about that. A thousand years without needing to relocate. The specification was right the first time, and subsequent generations maintained it. That is not luck. That is disciplined engineering on a civilisation scale.
There is a moss garden at Kōdaiji temple that has been tended the same way since 1606. Four hundred and twenty years of the same process, documented and passed down. No retrospective was required to discover that the moss was growing correctly. The gardener already knew. Because the specification existed.
The tea ceremony - the one everyone takes pictures of - has not changed meaningfully in four centuries. Fifteen precise steps. No sprint retro. No feelings shepherd. Just a process refined until it became invisible through mastery. The Japanese have a word for this: shuhari. Learn the rules. Follow the rules. Then transcend them. Notice that transcendence is step three, not step one. Waterfall practitioners have known this since 1959. Ribbit.
Zen rock gardens - karesansui - are my favourite example. Every stone is placed with intent. The rake patterns are not decorative, they are communicative. The meaning is encoded in the arrangement. If you move one stone, you change the entire message of the garden. This is architecture. This is what a requirements document is supposed to do. A garden that communicates without standups. Imagine that.
I told Mrs Froggy all of this when she asked why I picked Kyoto. She listened. She smiled. She said, "So you picked a city whose engineering principles match your manifesto."
I said yes. Then she said, "And you are going to sit in hot water and look at gardens and not think about the office for a week."
I said yes to that too. Because she was right about the first part, and I am trying to accept that she is right about the second part as well.
The site will remain operational. The server will stay up. The wall of shame will continue accepting submissions. The visitor counter will keep counting. The daily ribbit will update on schedule because I built it to be deterministic and I planned for this. That is what planning is for.
But email responses will be slower. Blog posts will pause. New features will wait. The games will not receive balance patches. The world will not end because I am not refreshing my inbox every eleven seconds.
I wrote that last sentence for Mrs Froggy. She has been saying it for years. I am finally hearing it.
"The specification is the software. The holiday is the deliverable. I wrote it down. That means I have to do it."
— Froggy, CEO, negotiating with himself
We leave today. We return on 25 June 2026. I have arranged for photographs. I am told this is what people do on holiday - they take pictures of things that are not merge conflicts. I will believe it when I see it.
Ribbit. For now, a quieter one than usual. And then silence until the 25th.
— Froggy
Froggy is CEO, CTO, CFO, and sole Distinguished Fellow of Rib IT Ltd. He is currently unreachable. He is in an onsen. This is fine. The specification covers it.