Just recently, I realised how important impressing yourself is when trying to maintain enthusiasm with your job. Doesn’t really matter what you do (as long as you care!), but things can go stale if you keep doing the same thing over and over, and never really provoking an “AWESOME! I did that!” reaction. Even if it’s only something small (at 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, little things can be fairly impressive!), it can give you a needed boost to productivity (ugh), enthusiasm and general satisfaction with work, life and all that!
Personally, I get my kick from cleaning really crappy data. Lucky for me, I’ve had a lot of crappy data to clean recently, so I’ve been able to flex my XPath, Regex, semi-complex MySQL and image manipulation muscles relatively frequently. If you’re as much of a fanatical cleaner and hoarder as I am, cleaning data is probably for you. Grab a 50MB CSV and try to programmatically make sense of it. It’s fun! I promise.
I’d wager those dainty pinkies never weighed anchor in a storm!
I also have a woman’s arms – men don’t get infections when they accidentally stab themselves with tree branches, they get super powers. Imagine if the Spiderman were real, Peter Parker would’ve just died and they’d have to close the museum, Peter’s grandmother and grandfather would’ve killed themselves, MJ and Harry would’ve had sex on Peter’s corpse as spider babies crawled out of his nose. It would’ve been terrible. I’d have still watched.
Recently been holed-up (that sounds like it should mean something else) with a project that’s set to drop Monday. Friday marked the end of payment gateway testing and end-tying-up and we’re basically there. I’ve got a screencast to record and some stuff for my own peace of mind, so tomorrow will be a work day as well, but this site is so worth it.
Since starting at buffalo, I’ve gone from kinda soured towards programming and work in general to liberated by both. I’ve got an amazing amount of freedom both personal and professional (can you go out for 2 hours in the day to get tattooed without making excuses? No? I can) and (I’m allowed to say this because it’s true) I’ve produced 2 amazing websites since being there.
I don’t know why it’s called cat grass – Eva’s the only one who eats it.
Awful, awful day today. I have a feeling I’m standing on the edge of learning a really expensive lesson. If I do learn it, I will be passing on my findings to every single person I meet. I may even get t-shirts made to spread the word.
So, the shitty thing about having a day off (especially when you’re the only developer somewhere) is that some lovely person hasn’t miraculously done all your work for you when you get back.
Still, you can only complain so much when your desk is like 20ft from your bed and you work on interesting stuff that pushes you. BOOYAH!
I was talking to Charlotte the other day (as husbands do to their wives) about the fact that I seem to have hit a few hurdles work-wise recently.
Rather than “always landing on my feet”, I’ve decided that I’ve been cartwheeling – I land on my feet for a bit, then take off again, spinning about my head until I can plant my feet for a bit.
I am currently in an on-my-feet stage. I’ve got an awesome job, where I only have to concentrate what I do best. I work with people who think the same as me (using twitter in the day isn’t frowned upon! taking pride in your work sometimes involves being brutally honest with people) and I don’t have to commute. It’s really an exciting time.
This may have seemed like it was going somewhere, with that badass metaphor at the start, but it’s just a thinly veiled excuse to brag about my job!
Today reminded me of when I first started writing web applications. When I first started glancing through PHP, and I didn’t have a clue what was going wrong, why things weren’t working, or how I was going to fix it. Until, right at the last minute, I took a step back and actually read the thing I thought was right, only to discover that it was totally wrong. I then wander to the lounge, dejected and beaten and look at my family, asleep and waiting for me.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t have this obsessive need to solve everything right now. I keep missing out on the important things in my life because I’m so paranoid that a fresh pair of eyes won’t fix the problem I’m having. Tonight, I was so frustrated that I actually cried and shouted and drank and wished for cigarettes. I’m so pathetic. I worked through deliveries of photos of my babies being cute, and my wife being sleepy and adorable, just to reach the realisation that I need to really look at a problem and stop wasting my time thinking that working harder, or swearing more will solve my problem. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I need to sleep more, not just go to bed and stare at the ceiling.
