12 months ago
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.
12 months ago
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 of these last pushes as I used to, but they are part of the job, and they never go away. Just like any job, there
12 months ago
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 to justify the time you are expending into the work. At some point, you have to ask if Optimizing the Optimized is worth it. Sometimes,
12 months ago
There are two sides to an offer – the Offeror and the Offeree. One who makes it and one you hope will accept it. In a given situation, you are never both (otherwise why?) The Offeror is trying to determine what they are willing to part with. The Offeree is then in the position to determine how much value they place on what is being given to them. The problem with this arrangement is that most times the Offeree walks into thinking – “Let’s see what I can get” – instead of knowing their value ahead of time. Over time
12 months ago
Does it permanently fix your problem? Does it create a new problem? Does it look worse than it did before? Does it get you over the hump today, but you’ll have work to do tomorrow? Does it achieve what you were hoping for? Is it even possible? Is it so small, that no one will care? There are many types of fixes, knowing which one you are doing and what the expectation of it is will drastically change your approach to the work you are doing. On the flip side, what you bring to a fix, what you do every
