Steven Swab

I've found that it's really difficult to work with your own code when others make drastic changes without telling you.  I've run into this problem, and I can no longer make heads or tails of the class that I've been working on.  It doesn't really help that there's a time crunch on, and that no one contacted me about this.  I'm hoping that in future this will not happen again.  And I hope that I'll be able to fix this class in the end.

So, it seems this little guy has a bunch of hidden bugs.  Who knew there could be so many?  I guess there are some problems *somewhere* and I'm not even sure where to begin here.  Well, here goes nothing...

It's a bit of a strange feeling, if you ask me.  For the first time in this whole project I wasn't sure what I should be doing.  I had finished all the obvious things that I was supposed to do.  I closed my tickets, I'd done some tweaking, and well, I really wasn't sure what I should do.  It's not as if there weren't things to do because there's always lots that needs to be done, but I wasn't sure what people were working on already, and what still needed to be.  I ended up asking my team lead, and she got back to me the next day.  Now I'm trying to implement a storyline by the end of today.  Should be interesting, and fun.

Stress is a truly strange thing.  The more pressure I put on myself, the less I'm actually able to get done.  The more I try and force myself to be more productive, the less productive I become.  It's one thing to know what needs to get done and how to work hard to achieve it, but if fear is the motivation to get something done it interrupts concentration and disrupts one's ability to think coherently. 

This week I had a difficult deadline to meet, and a bunch of stuff went wrong with my home computer.  I got really stressed because I couldn't work on it as much as I thought I needed to, and thought I wouldn't be able to make the deadline.  My work suffered a lot because of stress.  Then, when the deadline had passed I calmed down and approached the problems in a much more tranquil fashion, and I was able to finish most of the work in a day or two.  It's really quite amazing the difference a stress level can make.

In the future, I'm going to concentrate on being much more conscientious about being calm while working through problems and managing my time.