Burnout Days

For the past four weeks, I’ve been pulling 16-hour workdays — minimum! — to catch up with this big project we’re doing. It’s not really big, as in a gazillion lines of code, although it could be that already; rather, its big in that it has the potential to bring in big business for our company. The only problem is, the timelines are impossibly tight, and I can’t seem to extricate myself from my management duties long enough to code at all during regular work hours. The result? I hack into the wee hours of the morning, and I hack during weekends. Like today.

I now average only five hours — or less! — of sleep everyday. Unless I burn out and wind up a mindless zombie. It actually happens, no exageration — I’m awake, but I can’t squeeze one coherent thought out of my noggin anymore. I just wish they’d exempt me from all these meetings!

Anyway, most of the initial overhead I encountered was just familiarizing myself with the tech I needed to use. I wanted to use JSF for the UI, and I wanted to use Ajax-y widgets, so I picked Icefaces for my component library. Took me a while to grok the library, and my zombiefying burnout schedule didn’t help me grok it any faster. Now, though, I think I’m getting the hang of it, and learned quite a bit more about JSF along the way as well, and this week I’ll be able to concentrate more on the actual application itself, rather than the technology I’m using for it.

Now if only I don’t get called to any more meetings…