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It’s hard to believe that it has already been a full month since my last journal entry. The biggest reason I haven’t written anything here isn’t because there hasn’t been much to write about, oh no. Work has been very, very busy with the current client and I’m left mentally drained at the end of each day. There’s not much that I want to do after a day of dealing with this client and their ridiculous demands for 8-10 hours. What about the weekend, you say? I suppose I could have been writing on the weekends, but those have been sacred lately and the last thing I usually want to do is stare at my computer screen to work on the website or type out entries. Hell, I haven’t even wanted to play Factorio, even on the Steam Deck, for a while.
Also in recent events, very recent in fact, my Mom was in the hospital for really bad abdominal pain. After running a bunch of tests and not finding anything wrong, she was discharged once she was more stable and was given some meds to help out with the pain and nausea. Needless to say, I was very concerned to hear about this on Thursday, so my partner and I travelled down to see her and spend the weekend with her while my dad was out of town. The doctors still don’t know what’s going on with her, but she does seem to be better spirits after seeing my partner and I.
As for things domestically, not too much exciting has been going on. After work I usually have just enough energy and brain power to watch stuff on Hulu or YouTube with my partner and play a game or two on my Deck. Oh! I do have some game recommendations from the Steam Autumn Sale that have been really enjoyable so far: “High on Life” and “Haven”.
High on Life is sort of like taking Ratchet & Clank with a bigger emphasis on the FPS aspect and shoving the humor, and voice actors, of Rick and Morty into it. It’s definitely a weird game, but it’s not really any worse than binging an entire season of Rick and Morty plus Solar Opposites in a single weekend. Honestly, it’s a delightfully weird game that, while being a bit on the gross side in some parts, has the soul of Rick and Morty with a few unique weapons, wacky worlds to explore, and things to collect. I’d give it a solid 4/5 so far. I’m still not sure what the gallon of Alien Cum is for and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.
Haven, on the other hand, my partner found and has been a delightfully sweet couch co-op adventure game with some slice of life aspects, a bit of cooking, monster battling, and even some collectables. I don’t know how far through the game we are, but I have a feeling we may be in the first quarter still, or maybe just starting the second quarter of the gameplay? I really like that you can pick the genders of the two characters, but we have yet to see if that makes any significant impact on the gameplay. The movements takes a bit to get used to, but again it’s a delightful game with a really nice atmosphere of romance to it.
My goal of this journal wasn’t really to turn this into a thing full of doom and gloom where I only talk about the bad stuff, but it seems like I do that a fair bit on here when I don’t have a writing prompt. I’m not sure if that says more about my life, my personality, or the human condition. The jury still seems to be out on that one. So, I do apologize for the negativity about work stress and whatnot.
I would like to just take a moment to sing the praises of the team I work with and how amazing my boss is before diving into the rants and complaints. Have a shitty client sucks, but it’s made a lot less bad when I have a manager and project manager that back me (and the rest of our small team) up. It’s just so refreshing to know that someone has my back when things go south. The team makes the client tolerable and makes the long hours a bit less bad. And frankly, I sort of don’t even mind the longer work days sometimes. There’s that itch to solve a specific problem that I’m facing which drives me to really focus and get work done. The satisfaction I feel to finally get that problem solved (or at least get a new error message) is so immense. It’s also really great to see my hard work on display when the client is testing things, and to be able to use that as ammo to say we’re getting shit done.
For the sake of anonymity, I’ll call the two main assholes at the client Pete (the executive sponsor) and Eric (their “architect”). You’ll see why I put architect in quotes later on, or maybe in a future post depending on how much longer I’ll be on the treadmill today.
To keep things short-ish, suffice it to say that Pete is a champion gaslighter and excellent at speaking without actually saying anything. You know how LLMs tend to be very verbose and use a lot of fluff? That’s basically Pete in a nutshell, but somehow he’s an idiot that doesn’t understand project scope or timelines. Not only that, Pete is incapable of critical thinking skills and believe the solution to everything is to tell us to “work harder” and throw more bodies at the situation.
Then there’s Eric, oh boy…. Eric is a professional whiner, but admittedly pretty smart in some ways. I’ll give him some credit and say he knows how to design a system and has some good architecture skills given his experience. My biggest complaint about him, besides the whining, is he’s just not pragmatic. Pragmatism is an important skill of a software architecture because without it, you end up with these grandiose overly engineering solutions that do indeed work but don’t meet any sort of timeline. I’m not really an architect myself, but I like to think I have a lot of the skills of one as an experienced senior dev. I’m able to see the big picture and ensure the pieces fit together. More importantly, I’m able to raise flags when I see potential problems with things NOT fitting together right.
It’s taken me a couple of years in the professional and corporate world to really grasp this concept, but I’m really getting there and have found it makes me more successful. The whole idea is to make something work, then make it better. This follows the iterative design philosophy of those project management processes and methodologies that I will not name here. But for real, sometimes good enough is, in fact, good enough. At the end of the day, this client only needs the integration I’m working on to be in place for 6 months to a year at most. It’s merely to keep two systems in sync as they phased roll out the new system to more and more business units. It doesn’t need to be infinitely extensible and rugged. Sure, I could have designed something to be better and more permanent, and if I do this again, I likely will. However, given the timeline, the requirements, and the context I didn’t see a need to over-engineer something. I think Eric lacks this ability and on top of the whining, it affects his ability to lead a team. Good god does he whine a lot.
I won’t go too much into the whining here, but I will say that he’s one of those guys that can get really spiteful and make you follow ridiculous processes just for the sake of the process when all you need is for him to reply in a Slack thread to get a question answered.
Damn, I wasn’t expecting that work stress part to be so long! The upshot of all these extra hours and stress is that I’m at 109% utilization and getting a fat bonus check this quarter. So, I mean, that’s a thing, right? For the records, I was under 80% before the last month and a half, so 29% of that was from only 6 weeks or so.
I hope things with my Mom get better and that they either figure out what’s wrong, or the issue goes away and never comes back again. For her sake, I hope they figure it out and it turns out to be something minor. It’s really bothering her, especially as a nurse, to not know what the problem is. I hope that work settles down a bit and we don’t have to do a phase 2 with this nightmare of a client. I hope that I continue to find fun and cute games to play with my partner as a form of non-sexual intimacy and that I continue to enjoy playing my old PS2 games on the Steam Deck.
Family Taco Tuesday is coming up this week and I’m super pumped for that, too. I think it’s going to be a decent enough week for me and I hope it’s a good week for all of you, too.
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