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Saturday Musings - Open Heart Surgery
For a long time I’ve been putting off conducting open heart surgery….but this past week I decided that it was about time I pulled out the scalpel and made an incision. Thankfully, not on a human but on a platform I developed.
Like many things in life I've been procrastinating about doing this big slab of work for several years. I’d kept running into problems because the work wasn’t done but there always seemed to be some convoluted work around that allowed me to just make things work.
Finally, in a fit of frustration I took the plunge and began restructuring the foundations of an application that literally process tens of millions of requests each day. It was like looking at a great big ball of string and the more I pulled the more the string seemed to resist.
Knots would form and quickly become mini-projects in themselves that needed to be resolved before the bigger issues could be addressed. Numerous times I completely broke the entire system and found myself tracking down some esoteric piece of code written three years ago. Grrrrr!
In fact, a few times I just turned off pieces of code to see what, if anything, would happen. Nine times out of ten things would break and I would say a quite “whoops!” to myself before digging in to understand what was going on.
If you write code, then you’ll understand completely what I talking about. The act of creating something from scratch or in my case conducting some pretty extensive surgery is terrifying, exhilarating and satisfying all at the same time.
There were times during this past week where I was in the zone and everything just seemed to come together….while other times, not so much. At 3am last night I sat back with a stupid grin on my face as the major work was completed and I began sewing the patient back up. Sure, there is a lot more testing to be conducted but the bulk of the work was done.
I’ve been coding in one language or another for about 40 years now and I’ve never lost the desire to get my hands “back on the tools”. Yes, I could have given this job to a staff member but there’s just nothing like doing something yourself.
I’m a firm believer in forcing myself to keep my skills up to date so when I speak with clients I can approach solutions from both a technical and business perspective. I feel this gives me a unique perspective to solving problems and developing unique solutions.
Like me, you may have a number of tasks that you’ve been putting off for a long, long time. It may not be programming, maybe it’s doing something with your kids, sorting out a relationship problem or resolving an issue at work.
Whatever's on your list, let me assure you there is nothing quite like facing issues and dealing with them. I would encourage you this weekend to get in the zone and deal with those things that are holding up aspects of your life.
Have a great weekend,
Michael.
Comments
I seem to remember 1 to 3 am as being the time you find most of the answers. Interesting. I hear that writing code is to be a school requirement here in the states or already is. But you are right, if you just keep putting a band-aid on the project, the monster just grows larger until you say enough already and face it head on. Once it is working properly, you can relax, maybe. In relationships, hopefully there has not been too much damage done and you can still save it. I can respect that you still like to be hands on so you can relate on all levels.