And of course I’m going to work on a Sunday

ARGH.

Carve This In Stone

Image by vgm8383 via Flickr

I’ve never been one to make lists just for the sake of making lists. I just need to say some things and it just so happens that they could probably be put in a list. A list of things I will never do again, to be exact:

1. I will never, ever program while simltaneously filling a management role in a company. I can code, and I can manage, just not at the same frickin’ time!

2. Corollary to this is, I will never fulfill more than one role in any project for any company again. I cannot do sales/pre-sales on my own while simultaneously doing technical management and/or coding.

3. I will never work on weekends again.

4. I will never pull 16-hour weekdays again.

In tagalog, itaga nyo sa bato yan!

Odinsleep

Or, just joelsleep. Or better, Samildanachsleep.

Odinsleep is the healing sleep that Odin, and later, Thor, go into after getting gravely injured in battle. That’s what I just slipped into this afternoon, a deep, comatose-like healing sleep. After four weeks of working a minimum of 16 hours a day, and sleeping for a maximum of only 5 hours a day, I finally had to pay off my sleep debt. I’m still taking stock of my mind and body, to see if I’d actually made up for all that sleep deprivation and exhaustion. Hopefully it was enough to normalize things again, so I can be more productive at work.

I’m having second thoughts about still putting in some work today. It is, afterall, a Sunday, and I really have worked too many hours already for the past four weeks or so.

Speaking of Odin, Thor, and all things Asgard — I finally got Thor Vol. 1 and Vol . 2! I also got Astonishing X-Men Vols. 1 and 2 as well! I used to collect comics back in college, but not I tend to collect hardbound volumes and graphic novels instead. I’ll see if I can blog about my newly acquired eye-and-brain candy sometime.

And Two More Decide To Leave

In the midst of all the rush for this new project we’ve been working on, I received two resignations from the team deployed on-site with our Clever client. I just wish I wasn’t a zombie when I got their resignations last Friday; maybe I would’ve reacted more normally. Instead, I think I didn’t react at all. I was just numb from not sleeping for over 24 hours.

Actually, it wasn’t really unexpected. I’d warned management about the Clever situation months ago. And the “special” announcement they were waiting for in July didn’t happen. So yeah, this was expected. I really can’t blame them either. Hostile client environment, stupid tech, and stupid use of tech, and… well, economic downturn and all that… I’m actually grateful they lasted this long at the oxymoronic Clever client at all!

If my spidey-sense is anything to go by, there are potentially a couple more who are looking to file their resignations soon as well, both from our on-site team, and from among the guys in the office. I wish it weren’t so, but that’s just the way it is. The entire big-picture scenario is kind of complicated, and its a pity we (management) haven’t had a good enough job of convincing everyone to keep the faith just a little bit longer — at least not good enough to convince these guys to stay.

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…