Comfort food is the best – you look forward to it, and it can do no wrong. When you’re having a bad day, it makes you feel better. In short, it gives you comfort. Comfort work can be like that too – we all have the tasks we enjoy to do, the ones we volunteer for and look forward to. No matter what happens, it always gives you comfort that you are the best person for…
Someone always has to do it. You know it has to be done. You might not be able to be the one to do it. But it still needs to be done, even if everyone else doesn’t see it. The question is whether you’re the one whose going to do it.
The Late Night Drive is the work you do late, the work that can’t be stopped. You don’t look at the clock. You don’t see the time. You just work. And then next thing you know, the night is over, the drive took you there. The goal pushed you forward. The Late Night Drive keeps you going.
I recently had to do one of those “delivery sprints in a week” things because something went wrong and we had to fix it. Long days, long nights, early mornings first trying to figure out what went wrong and then coming up with a solution to fix it and of course then having to test it to make sure you didn’t screw anything up in your rush to fix it. I don’t do as many…
Performance Tuning is great work to do because there is a constant wave of immediate feedback and the metrics for success are easy to quantify. Did it go faster? Win. Did it reduce costs? Win. Did it use less resources? Win. At some point, those returns become smaller, you go from optimizing hours/minutes to seconds/milliseconds. It’s at that point you have to ask whether the effort you’re putting is going to get you the returns…