What a Fantastic Day – Too Bad it was Doomed
Today was one of those days you can't believe. I was coding to some wonderful music on my iPod and things were just falling into place. I'd write a method, it'd be say a dozen lines of code, and then I'd look back at it and think Wow! That's impressive. It covers all the bases, and is elegant. I did that again, and again, and again.
I had about 3 hours of this today. It was spectacular. Really. I can't remember the last day I had when I was this hot on the keyboard. It's been a while, I can tell you that.
So of course, it had to end badly. Doesn't it always?
It started when I had the basics of this F/X correction into my web app. It was absolutely wonderful. It slipped in cleanly and easily, and it worked like a charm. Sure, it had methods that needed to be database-driven as opposed to the hard-coding, but that was to save time and make sure I had it all under control.
I had a method that would give me the conversion factor for a 'from' and a 'to' currency code, for example. This needs to be driven of the database of F/X rates, but I had the basic conversions coded up as fixed numbers. The method worked, and once I got the database work in place, it would be driven off better data, but the essentials were there, and everything could be seen to be working.
This was all done about a week early, by the way.
So I mentioned to my manager that I had the rough-cut of the F/X conversions in. I tried to explain the things I had yet to do, but he was already off to the races: "Did you get this in yet? How about this? Can I see this?" Like an old boss I'd had. Excited, which is nice, but already assuming that a week early is "normal" for me.
In a very real sense, I condition people to expect greatness from me and then I'm stuck with their expectations. It's only taken three months for this manager. Yet I can't blame him. For these three months I've been working exceptionally hard to get things going, and I've got an impressive string of successes already. That I got this done in a day is not really all that surprising. But it'd be nice if he at least gave it 5 mins before asking if I'd done the next three things on my list.
Just give me a little rest.
So I ended up on a real downer when it should have been fantastic. Bummer.