This has been a constantly annoying and frustrating series of weeks at work.  Things never went quite right, and for some reason I have been internalizing the blame for the problems.  Technically, as one of my coworkers pointed out to me, it is the whole user story team that succeeds or fails when these things go wrong but I had more to do with this codebase so I feel more responsible.  I thought briefly that I might get through today without any major drama or flare up, but as if by script 30 minutes before the end of the day something else went wrong.

Oh well, at least it is the weekend and I’ve got GenCon coming up.  I’ve only got a two-day work week next week, then I’m away on vacation followed immediately by a trip to Peoria.  The trip to Peoria for work is much needed, and I get to stay an extra day to spend some more time with my family.  It will be nice to see everyone and even nicer to have some relaxing time without enduring the office stress.

It’s annual review time again, so I’m busy getting my write-up put together.  Tasha and I had a very lazy evening tonight, opting to take a nap after work and then we hit up Chick-fil-A so I had enough energy to endure writing a boring document all night.  Sadly, I’m not much more exciting than this tonight so I’ll leave it here for now.

This week has been going by at a furious pace.  Excessively annoying bugs, conflicting priorities, and some administrative stuff that must be done before I go to GenCon adds up to a lot of work related frustration for me.  The good news is that vacation is coming up, followed immediately by a trip back to Illinois for work.

I’m looking forward to seeing the old crew in Peoria and spending at least a few days with my parents and family at the end of the week.

Aside from that, I don’t have much else to report.  Tonight was D&D Encounters and it was very fun.  This weekend is going to be a big pile of gaming thanks to some events at our local gaming store.  Hopefully most of my work will be done by then, but only time will tell.

Today was another barn-burner at work.  I can handle a fairly significant amount of change in a given time period, but lately it has been grating on me.  Without going into too much detail, I was asked to essentially change what I was supposed to be focused and working on three times in three days.

Normally, this isn’t a problem.  Coupled with slightly more than three weeks of 10-12 hour days, and my mood is not increased when this amount of change is added.  At one point around 1 pm, I was very close to leaving for the day because I was stressed out and I had met my limit for having constructive conversation for a week.

I decided that instead of being pissed off and stewing about it for all weekend, I would take the opportunity to talk to both my manager and the lead marketing guy about my concerns and problems.  Trust me, I was surprised as anyone to tell you that it actually made things better.

Most of the “this stuff must be done by X” and “you must get Y done or else it’ll screw up Z” pretty much dropped away under a much-needed wash of rational thought and reason.  I actually left the meeting with our marketing lead with a smile on my face, something that hadn’t really happened this week on its own accord.

I guess if there was a moral to this story, it is this: constant, purposeful communication helps.  If you’re stressed at the office, sometimes reaching out instead of just sitting at your desk and fuming is the best salve for a weary soul.

It also helps when you are informed that Monday is actually a paid vacation day.  Apparently, if a holiday falls on a Sunday we still get the Monday off.  That also went a long way to improving my end-of-week perspective.

I have been in a foul mood in the office this week.  There are many contributing factors, most of all continued pressure late in our development cycle.  Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that I am Busy.  With a capital B.

I have heard about the development approach of having the entire team get into a room together and code/test/fix things and we actually tried it with this release.  Today, since we were starting a new user story (late) I opted to do this once again and I was amazed at how productive I was.  In fact, I might have a run at pulling off the impossible and getting things done in time for the end of Friday!

I actually love coding.  I love designing as well.  What I don’t like is doing either while under extreme pressure to deliver.  I could now vent for a long time about how processes fit into this space, but I don’t feel like putting up a 2,000 word essay on the topic tonight.

I will leave it at this: if you leave a nerd to code, he will code.  Most times, he will code for what appears to be a ridiculous amount of time without sustenance or other human interaction.  If you add to this a neverending batch of ultra-high priority items, said nerd will code until he is a withered skeleton with no social skills and eventually you will be staffing another role because he slumped over at his desk one day.  Also, accusing that skeleton of not producing enough only makes you look stupid.

I don’t know why this is difficult for management to understand.  Maybe one day I will, but that day will not be today.

It was a great day at work today.  I had a lot to do at the front half of the day, we had some design meetings and then the rest of my afternoon opened up and I actually got some work done.  This time, I got to create a REST web service from the ground up.  Since I was copying an established pattern in our code it wasn’t very difficult and I got a good feeling of accomplishment for being able to take something from the bottom to functional prototype all in a few hours.

Tomorrow I get to show off / educate the rest of our team and continue being productive, hopefully this will continue to be a satisfying work week.

At work, I had to do battle with a particularly annoying set of bugs.  These were the type of bugs where everything looked like it was working properly and just wasn’t functioning correctly.  After beating my head against the table all day, getting frustrated and fed up, having some Chick-fil-A, I eventually had an “a-ha!” moment and was able to solve the problem.

Since the “a-ha!” came at 2 pm, I was busting my butt to get the code done, tested, and checked in prior to being out of the office until Thursday of next week but I got it done.  I even did more testing than I normally would have done, because I don’t want to get called on my time off.

This was one of those moments where I only knew the fix because I had done this work before in the past, so it was a really nice feeling of accomplishment coupled with pride that I actually was the right person for this particular job.

So now it’s vacation time!!  Matt and Sarah show up on Sunday and I am definitely looking forward to it!

Today was one of those fairly rare days for me where every task I attempted either got interrupted, or was in that magical state where it was the absolute last thing on Earth that I wanted to work on.

Part of this problem was exacerbated by the fact that 2/3 of my tasks were in a state where I was forced to wait on input or action from someone else, which led to broad stretches of today where I was waiting around.

In an effort to fill this time with something valuable, I started working on revisions to a few documents.  Documentation is one of those things that I will do if there is a reason for it, but I don’t particularly enjoy.  Despite these documents being fairly important, in the context of today they felt to me like busy-work (ironically forced on me by ME) and it was exceedingly hard to get focused enough to make any real headway.

So in a nutshell, I am my own worst enemy today.

Did I get work done?
Yes.

Did I work as furiously hard as I normally do?
Not by a long-shot.

Is that really a problem?
Oh, probably not but that won’t stop me from feeling bad about it anyway.

Am I talking to myself AND answering myself?
Yes.  Which means it is time to go!

Today marks the official end of my winter break, it’s back to work in the morning!  This should kick off a flurry of work that is likely to last for quite awhile, but I’m rested and prepared to make some magic happen.  The good news: as of January 1st, I’ve got my three weeks of vacation time since I’ve been with the company for 5+ years now… that means as soon as our targets are met this year I will be ripe with vacation time.  I’ve long considered paid vacation time the best possible incentive.  I get paid to NOT BE AT WORK and that is awesome.

All that aside, today is also going to mark the start of one of my 2010 sub-goals.  Tasha and I are going to do the first lesson in Financial Peace University, aiming to reacquaint ourselves with the program and get fired up for our final kick to debt freedom.  We’re looking forward to the refresher!

It’s getting late and I have to get up in the morning, so I suppose I should sign off here and try to get some sleep.  More tomorrow!

Training continued today, we learned a lot about team roles and I was surprised that we got an assignment to watch 12 Angry Men and examine the different leadership styles of the jurors.  This movie has long been a classic favorite of mine, I originally had to watch it for English class in high school.  Henry Fonda is excellent in this movie!  I’m getting a lot out of this training, however I’m getting about ready for it to be over.

I’m also looking forward to getting back to the gym on Friday and the dojo next week!