Working your butt off…

doesn’t seem to translate to blogging a lot. Although the link collection continues to grow. Be scared, be very scared…

On the plus side, we brought the first of the xServes to help out (and eventually replace) the Sun boxes. It’s definitely helped with some of the capacity issues I’ve been fighting, and I’m seeing 4X or better performance compared to the E250. Not bad, and there’s definitely room to tweak.

On this beast I’ve been living with (which, unfortunately, I still can’t go into detail on. soon. I hope), we’ve been having, well, I’d like to call them birthing problems, but in reality, I miscalculated some key capacity assumptions, and then our Xserves didn’t come on line quite fast enough, and we stuffed everything on a mostly-full E250. 8 pounds of stuff, five pound bag. Been interesting getting stuff to work right. And time consuming, since we’re also rolling out added functionality, while managing the holiday glut and prepping for MacWorld.

And lest you think I’m griping — I’m not… In the spring, I went to my management and said “I think I’ve had enough of doing yet another email system. I’m bored, I’m not challenged. Time to do Something Else”.

And they offered me, well, something else. It still involves email, sort of. But where my previous preference was doing the Lone Wolf project and handing stuff over when it was finished and running the machiens and servers and generally having my hands in everything, this beast and tendrils everywhere. I’m technically and administratively managing three people, doing some coding, but primarily at a much higher level, architecting, playing at DBA, working with people all over the company, trying to tie together all the details and make sure everything integrates (which it does, mostly). it is also a project I’d been trying to get built for a while now, and couldn’t get funding.

It got funded. Of course I agreed to do it. It’s been a huge mental and technical stretch, forcing me to break old habits and rethink pretty much everything I do. Which means I’m occasionally screwing up, guessing wrong, or simply wrong. There have been major, nasty deadlines, lots of stress, various moments of “it’ll never work, I’m a loser”, moments of abject fear, depression and the occasional thoughts of suicide (real, virtual, and/or professional). 60 hour weeks aren’t atypical…

I’ve been having a ball. It’s been a real stretch. Sometimes, we barely made it. but we did. When the first pieces shipped, it was about a C+ beast. Now, it’s in the B’s somewhere. I’ve always been someone who talks about the need to understand and work as an ambassador of your customer’s needs, but this is the first time since I stopped doing customer support I’ve really had to get so deep into that.

There’s really no other way to describe it, it’s been one hell of a hack. Even though maybe 5% of the code is mine. Maybe 2%.

but it hasn’t always left much time for other things. While I finished christmas shopping (as much as a self-defense out of a last minute time crunch as a preference to shop early), I’ve decided I simply don’t have time for christmas baking. the last couple of years, I’ve taken time out to do some holiday cookie and candymaking as a way to break away from the grind and get in the christmas mood. This year, I was finding trying to find the time the grind, so I nuked it. Maybe I’ll make divinity in March, or maybe not. but it made no sense to fight and be grumpy about something that’s supposed to be relaxing and fun.

My goals for between now and the first are pretty simple: get caught up on e-mail again (I was, for about two days), catch up on all those links I want to talk about “as soon as I get a free minute”, and find my desk in the piles of “stuff” I have waiting for me to do something with (a chunk of it aimed at this place; for instance, my long-delayed guide to Victoria, which I’d like to write before we make our next trip…)

And have fun. Did you know stress could be fun? well, it’s not, actually. But as part of a larger mosaic….

I think we crossed the last major

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