Caught By Ambition, #2

I'm really looking forward to this four day weekend I have coming up. I've been feeling pretty burnt out recently. I've had a of opportunity to make decisions. I've also been fortunate enough to make a few rather large mistakes in a short period of time.

Decision making is hard. Being the lead developer of a software team isn't hard because you have more responsibility towards a project, it's hard because you are forced to make more a lot more decisions.

Whether it is helping other developers make important design decisions, prioritizing upcoming work on the backlog, or jumping between code reviews and team meetings, lots of decisions have to be made from a holistic team perspective rather than an individual perspective.

Growing up, I tended to enjoy individual work as I was given total control over my work and I didn't have to working about slacking team members. While today I don't really worry about needing absolute control or slacking developers, it's hard to be responsible not only for your own work but to ensure that impediments for other developers are removed as quickly as possible.

The things that tend to stress me out the most are undefined and nebulous requirements and features. Because undefined features force developers to make decisions and evaluate trade offs. A lot of work goes into clearing up the bigger picture and trying to generate concrete tasks from that. It's easy to say "I want this and that", but when it comes to developing "this" or "that" and each feature has huge generic requirements attached to them, it's hard to jump into the problem without feeling a little overwhelmed.

That's some of what I have to think about and manage on a daily basis, but recently I have been given specific unplanned requirements and features at the last second and it is those moments when I wish I could just be a clueless junior developer again.

I thought this week would be better, but I started the week by:

• screwing up an oil change by forgetting to drain the oil
• having my wallet lost in the wilderness by leaving it on a car to have someone drive that car while changing my oil
• spending hours trying to find the wallet only to find my expired (and useless) driver's license that was in the broken pocket of my wallet
• needing to reapply for all the cards / licenses that were in that wallet
• one of those cards being necessary to even get access to my job
• waiting hours to apply for a driver's license and my access card

The good news is that this wallet and cards just wasted a bunch of time and probably US 100 dollars altogether (including license renewals). I learned a lot from this misfortune, so that is always good. Life goes on even when life throws some chaos in your direction. It could always be worse. I could have lost my hardware wallet. Hell, even my Steem wallet is worth more. That's a positive, I guess.