A Coders Resilience And The Art Of Not Beating Herself Up Too Much

CREATED BY THE THE ONE, THE ONLY, STEFFI LEWIS
Published: 26/09/2024 @ 08:58AM

As a 31-year veteran web developer, I'm used to working on software projects that take a bit of time to complete. However, with me upgrading YourPCM to Version 2, there's a far longer scale and intensity to it, and I need to dig deep just to keep going right now ...

Resilience Is Needed When You're 60% Through A Project And Your Deadline Is In Sight

Resilience prevails, Against life's toughest trials, Strength in the struggle

YourPCM Version 2 (or just V2 as I call it) is looking amazing, is full of new functionality, is smaller, faster and generally a much better product than Version 1 ever was. But, Version 1 of YourPCM took 4 years to get to where it is now and I had to make a lot of compromises to get it to work the way I wanted.

So it needed rewriting and upgrading!

And this is where the hard work and intensity comes in. I've got a deadline of the 1st of December to finish it and get it into testing and after this weekend, I'll only have two modules I need to update ... thank goodness I have all the Version 1 code to start with so I can confidently say I'll make the deadline in time.

However, there are many sacrifices that must be made when you work on a project with a deadline that you can see approaching quickly. Spending all day every day at your desk in full creative flow leaves little time for anything else. The phrase, "Eat, sleep, code, repeat" is joked about in virtual networking events I attend, but it's the reality of my world right now.

My poor house is in a bit of a state!

I went to a face-to-face networking event last night. It was with a group of people I know well and I had friends in the group. I was happy chatting with people, but felt a little awkward as my brain was mulling over the code I needed to write over the next few days, so some of my bandwidth was preoccupied.

When I stood up to deliver my 60 seconds I felt flat, boring and self-conscious about everyone looking at me. There'd been some seriously funny pitches before me and I don't remember what I said, but did mumble something about losing my perspicacity and not feeling quite human right now, and sat down in relief.

As it was raining so hard and there'd been a lot of flooding in the area, my cross-country drive gave me a great excuse to run out of the door once the formal part of the event had finished, and a few seconds later I was happily cocooned in my beloved little car, driving quickly out of town, back to my village.

I don't think the solution is more coding!

I know that panicking about these things and working even harder isn't going to happen because that way lies madness. I need to eat, sleep, relax and repeat just like all humans, even if I don't feel like one right now.

Thankfully I'm going out for dinner with my best friend this evening so that's both something to look forward to and a distraction from my project though I must remain conscious that I don't start talking about my work or I'll get a withering look from her.

I have a deadline, I have the focus to finish the project on time, and the confidence to know that I will get there. I just have to accept that maybe face-to-face networking isn't the best thing for me right now as I have little ability to talk about anything other than my work.

I'm even boring myself now!

Like thousands of programmers, developers and coders before me, and the thousands who will follow ... a deadline is a deadline, and we can only do our best to reach it on time without burning ourselves out.

But yes, resilience ... I normally have buckets of the stuff, but the tap is running a little dry right now. The coder girl just needs to be like water and go with the flow, and more importantly, stop beating herself up. I'm very much looking forward to finishing YourPCM Version 2 and I will finish it on time.

Then maybe I can focus on being a human for a while.

Until next time ...

STEFFI LEWIS
A legend in her own lunchtime

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About ...

I'm a 31-year veteran web developer, who published one of the first 1,000 websites in the entire world when I worked at The Open University way back in 1993. Since then I've been involved with projects big and small, funded and unfunded, corporate and commercial. I was part of the dot com boom and contracted in California in the mid-2000s.

On my return to the UK circa 2011, I started work on my digital marketing platform SLO Media, and have run that successfully for over a decade. During the pandemic, when we were all bored out of our skulls, I created YourPCM, a CRM designed exclusively for UK small business owners (sorry rest of the world), then built YourAI as my artificial intelligence playground (yay for the whole world!). Although it was only ever meant to be a new module for YourPCM, I made it available commercially when a number of my friends and networking buddies saw it and demanded access to this handy set of content creation tools.

And now we have sBlogIt! which is a more focused version of the blogging part of YourAI with enhancements up the wazoo and the ability to create and publish an entire blog post in just a few minutes using a low-cost token-based system. If you want to know more about all that, you can visit sblogit.com and sign up for free. We'll even give you 50 tokens to get you started, so no excuses, ok?

My head is in The Cloud, my heart belongs to The Web, and my soul is filled with such beautiful code 💗

And so here we are ...

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