jessenoller.com

Yeah — two weeks since my last post. The lit­tle jour­nal of goals I keep in text­mate has two carry-over goals:

@personal
— Work out every night
— 1 blog post/day (real con­tent)
— Count to 10 before reply­ing to any­one, your­self included. (I kid!)

I have been the con­duc­tor on the fail­ure train for both of these. The pri­mary being the bees I ref­er­enced in the title, and by bees I mean “the last two weeks of a release”. At work we’ve been grind­ing on a major upgrade to our exist­ing prod­uct and the last few weeks have been that painful con­tin­u­ous rep­e­ti­tion that comes with all major releases — test, find bug, fix bug, test, ver­ify bug, check bug queue, repeat.

With all soft­ware releases, it’s that last painful trade­off of bug vs. release that tends to sting the most — do you delay the release and fix it now or do you bump it to a patch release late — and fix­ing it now means recurs­ing back into test-ville.

I’ve had a weird anal­ogy locked in my head lately — think­ing of bugs as bees that want to sting you. One hurts for a minute, and then goes away — a lot at once just make you pass out. What really kills you is a batch of say, four big ones that tag you with some reg­u­lar­ity. You just start to get angry and sullen and you want to punch the bees. In this case though, their bugs and you can’t punch bugs.

I’ll punch every bee in the face! –Dane cook

Besides the stress of the release (ah, but that stress is gone right? RIGHT?) the preg­nancy of the Noller con­tin­ues. These past few weeks have waxed between banal and “excit­ing” — and of course by excit­ing I mean “I have started research­ing blood pres­sure med­ica­tion or bleed­ing as a tech­nique for relief”.

Mainly, my won­der­ful wife is a lit­tle under one month away from the “pro­jected” due date. In real­ity, we’ve crossed over to “oh crap are you going into labor” ter­ri­tory. It’s all very excit­ing — I think we’re both ready to stop being “preg­nant” and to start being “sleep­less” instead. It would take a lot of worry out of our lives.

Well, with any luck — I should be a bit bet­ter this week — right now I’ve got around 150 tagged items in Net­NewsWire to fol­lowup on, and a bunch of notes to trudge through.

Yeah — two weeks since my last post. The lit­tle jour­nal of goals I keep in text­mate has two carry-over goals: @personal — Work out every night — 1 blog...