Only one person on a project ever knows where the release is truly at. Whether it’s the person that’s taking the sum of the parts or the person responsible for their own team’s part – there is always that one person on every project that has the most intimate knowledge as to what is being released. They don’t need to feel the pulse, they are the pulse, and they release pulsates at every right and…

Is it the duration that kills us? The unknown? If we knew, would we care how long it would take? If we knew how long we’d have to wait but still knew that it was an unknown would it still drive us up the wall waiting for the answer? Does it matter how many times you hit refresh or pull down on your notifications? It doesn’t. Sometimes all you can do is wait.

I have spent most of this week refactoring code. Tweaking it. Optimizing it. Tracking it. Making it more performant, trying to figure out what does and doesn’t work and work, debugging through a mountain of bugs, and generally… making it work. It’s not simple work, it’s frustrating, it’s time-consuming, but it’s always eye-opening how the beauty of simplifying your work, has the potential to work that much better.

There is never enough time to take a step back and figure out what is wrong. Never. Ever. Until it breaks and then you have a ton of time on your hands to figure it all out, design the perfect solution and fix everything that was wrong. That’s odd, I thought there wasn’t enough time?

Coding with a team is like a relay race. Everyone runs (Sprints) as fast as they can, they go all out, pushing as hard as they can until they can’t go any further, and then they hand off to their teammate, who goes and does the same thing. Everyone’s top speed is different, but we are all driving towards the same goal. And no one can do it alone.