If you are wondering why it has been so quiet here, the reason is pretty simple: I am inundated with day job work. This has been building over the last few months for a variety of reasons, but the main crux is that I am project manager and technical lead on 3 projects, all of which appear to be converging for a simultaneous rollout. How I will manage this is still a question. Mostly, I have been focusing on one task at a time whenever possible just to get through the day.
It has, obviously, affected my blogging. It has also affected my writing. A glimpse at the last 3 months of writing data paints a pretty clear picture, and brings to very real life the bare fact that there are only so many hours in the day.
Where as I was coasting along pretty smoothly at 800 to 1,000 words a day, these days, I’m lucky to hit 500 words. My consecutive day streak is still unbroken (767 days as of this writing) but the pace has slowed dramatically.
So what is this perfect story of projects that is keeping me working through the day, and often well into the night?
One of the projects is an implementation of a conference room reservation system. This project was supposed to rollout back in February, but enough critical bugs were uncovered that we went back to the software manufacturer to get fixes before we could release it. We got some (but not all) the requested fixes, and are now doing our own internal regression testing in preparation for rolling that software out by the end of our fiscal years, which happens to be the end of September.
One of the projects is outsourcing our building information software to a cloud-based system. This requires ensuring that we can generate the same types of reports we get today, but also requires us to build integrations with internal systems, which complicates things somewhat.
And one of the projects is a data warehouse project, in which I am acting as project manager, technical lead, and sole developer. It’s a great project, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. Unfortunately, this is one of those great ideas that keeps getting pushed off for more urgent things, and this is one of those now-or-never situations.
That’s not all I am working on, but that is what is keeping me most busy in the day job. This is leaving me very little time for writing, and no time for blogging. But I do want to change that. I miss posting here, and I want to get back into the habit of it. This November marks 10 years that I’ve had this blog, a pretty significant milestone. I’d love for that milestone to be a jumping off point for new and exciting things here. But first I need to get through this storm.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but the worst of the storm is yet to come, and so, while I will do my best to drop in here more frequently, if you don’t see me, you can safely assume it is because I’ve been sucked into a project tornado, and whisked away to some kind of Oz of Project Land. Hopefully, by October or early November, all of this will be behind me.
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