For all of us, there will times, many times, when our efforts end in failure. Sometimes, they will be small failures. And sometimes, they will be spectacular failures. Sometimes, you will be at fault. And sometimes, despite all your best efforts, someone else will be at fault. It doesn’t matter. It’s just another opportunity. …
I recently found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to look for a new job. Thanks to the “alleged” poor life decisions of a certain former leadership person, the company I had poured most of the last four years into was closing its doors. We’d limped along best we could for a time after the “event”, but it was not to be. It was time to put it out of its misery. Those of us that had survived that long suddenly found ourselves with a need to go job hunting.
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In a previous blog post, I talked about taking time to unplug in order to avoid burnout. That’s not what this is about. This is about getting in the zone. It’s about those times when you are so deep into the code that you just keep going and going. This is about those times when you get an idea and you dive headlong in and don’t come up for air for hours. Stop it. Stop it right now. Take a step back. Take a moment to breathe. …
It seems one of the most basic concepts. Yet it gets completely hidden by the developer community. It doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have in a particular language. There are still things you will have to look up EVERY SINGLE DAY. I really started to think about it. Why are we ashamed to admit that publicly? A couple of reasons came to me pretty quickly: Ego and envy.
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One of the biggest struggles that developers face is burnout. I’ve seen it happen time and time and time again. We do too much. We work 40, 50, 60 or more hours a week in an office doing development work, then come home and spend another 20, 30 or more hours at home working on our personal projects or side clients. Add to all that the various levels of personal commitments we might outside of development, be it family, church, charity work, and so forth. All that time takes its toll and, if we’re not careful, it overwhelms us and we burn out. It happened to me. …
A lot of people ask me what I do as a developer. Well, it’s pretty simple. I convert marketing promises (more commonly referred to by developers as lies and bullshit) into applications (referred to by developers as see the amazing creation of perfection I have created that somewhat resembles the lies marketing told but is in every way better than their promises anyway).
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