And another day ends...

But I can say with a certain degree of surity that I did get something done today - trivial in the grander scheme of things but paramount given my present context. The design that I came up with for the Logging infrastructure is like the silver bullet that will slay the Logging vampire. But wait, that's not the end of the story. After some thought and hard-selling through sheer technical prowess, I got buy-off on the Logger to do the uploading of the diagnostic events to user-mode also. This is immediately a visibility boon because I'm solving two problems with one solution - and I architected it, albeit with some inspiration from Karan, and that makes me proud!

Tuesday afternoon is a key session at work for me - it's when I have my weekly 1:1. The key discussion bullet for this afternoon was the Logging Architecture. After getting my manager excited about logging, I switched gears and discussed some issues that had been on my mind for a few weeks, both personal and professional. He now knows that things have gone awry in the realm that is my personal life and the effects this has had on my productivity at work. I also had some words to say about him randomizing my efforts causing me to lose focus and not meet deadlines and not deliver.

If there is one thing I've learnt from reactions to management policy these last two odd years is to avoid the randomization of the people who work for you. Not only does this stress them out but it also drastically reduces productivity, which works hand in glove with morale. To work for hours and days on a project without any tangible results, that's typical of the software industry. Compare this with the service industry and you'll know why geeks and software engineers are among the most clinically depressed and warped creatures out there. It's hard to turn off the introspective eye once you get off work because your brain has been in overdrive all day - designing a solution, resolving an issue, finding bugs - and we all know what happened to the man who thought too much...