Working from home the next couple days

August 20, 2008

This project I’m on has been something of a nightmare. Way too many meetings, too many people involved, not enough people who actually understand how the systems work. As a result I’ve been dragged into a large percent of those meetings, plus people are stopping by my cube on a regular basis asking me questions about how the ETL system will work. For example, on Monday the longest period I had in front of my computer was a one-hour window during lunch. Throughout the day I had meetings and teleconferences to attend, with at most 30 minute breaks in between except for that one-hour lunch break.

It has gotten so bad that I haven’t been able to get my work done. I can’t write code in short snippets like that, I need head-down time to focus. So I got permission to spend the next two days at home, ignoring email and voicemail. Just focused on writing the actual code.

I actually did a little coding tonight, which breaks one of my rules about not spending too much time focused on work. It was one of the mistakes I made when working in San Francisco for CNET — I would spend upwards of 12 hour days, and then sometimes when I get home I’d log on and answer emails I hadn’t gotten to during the day.

But my excuse now is that for one thing this is actually a lot of fun. I’m learning a ton about .NET, especially as it relates to ASP.NET. This is an amazingly good library they’ve built here. If there’s something you want, it’s probably already there. Plus because so many other people are writing in .NET there’s tons of examples and references available online and at the bookstore. So unlike the Oracle PL/SQL stuff I did at my last job, where the only decent reference source were Oracle’s own forums. And even those were pretty lame compared to what Microsoft makes available on their sites.

Wish me luck. The next two days are possibly the longest contiguous coding time I’ve had in years. No meetings, no email, no voice mail. Just me, the IBM ThinkPad, and Microsoft Visual Studio. Oh, and a big .NET reference manual sitting beside me.