Wednesday 15 April 2015

Everything is Coming Up Fodder

I'm sorry that this post is basically a what I ate for breakfast post, but writing is writing, right? And forcing myself to get words on a page is part of the exercise!

Being the Easter period and all, a lot of people were taking time off work because it also coincides with school holidays. I've pretty much taken all of my leave that I'll be entitled to for a long time for my honeymoon, so other than the wedding, I didn't have much leave left to take, so I was in the office. Which meant that the two usual go-to guys for my system were not in the office, they had to rely on the AAA-team: me (Intern Daniel dubbed me the AAA-team because the Z-team was still too good for me, so he went AA-team, but even that was too good, so I'm the AAA-team. If you open an excel doc, look at how many cells you have to scroll across before you get to the AAA column, That's how bad I am, according to Intern Daniel).

For the first couple of days, I was just completely lost. People were asking me things that I vaguely knew about, but since I was never directly involved in it, and some of these things were done before I was in the team, I spent a lot of time trawling the codebase to answer simple questions.

Today though, I was on fire. Yesterday I had fixed a big issue, and today I packaged it up to be tested. There was another issue dropped in my lap, and I managed to quickly get to the bottom of that one as well. Lastly, just as I was about to leave, I got an email with another issue, and even though I was due to meet my friends for a belated birthday lunch, I managed to solve that issue pretty quickly, and make it out in time to get there for entrees.

I have been feeling pretty down about my own skills lately, even to the point where I pretty much have a foot out the door and am looking for a different career path. However, today made me feel so good. I was fixing up erroneous configuration, telling people to grep the logs for the information I needed, writing SQL to try and track down the database entry that was causing an issue. I just felt like I was really in the zone today. Every single issue that came across my inbox was resolved today, and there were quite a lot. Granted, some of them were there because of a mistake that I had made, which isn't great, but at least I was able to work out what the cause was without having to rely on one of the more senior developers.

That's just the support issues I had to deal with. I also managed to close off two development tasks today. I am on fire. Feeling so good right now.

To top it all off, I had dinner with my friends from work, and we had deliciously greasy food, topped with playing a few rounds of Werewolf at the dinner table. After a few false starts where people accidentally revealed who they were ("OK, so I'm a werewolf, what do I do now?"), we managed to get everyone into the game, and had a few tricky situations, but I think overall, everyone had fun accusing each other.

If I were a superstitious person, I'd say that after today, a heap of bad things are going to happen to me. Luckily, I am only somewhat superstitious.

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