Ave1

To name some; going awol, going off on an inconsequential angle, moving in circles or in short "being an engineer", or "engineering". All failure modes¹ that I have discovered also apply to me.

At a previous job I made the asked for product but also 2 Integrated Development Environments out of parts laying around. Including a parser framework, a web based UI, a structural editor, an automatic test executor. When the first one became functioning for a while and my production level improved because of it, I decided it needed a rewrite. I was doing my required job and to the outer world productive (and I seemed to be sought out for what I did) but, I could have spent all that time to pull myself out of software engineering.

This past year, I've tried to get better. Not better as in improving myself, but get better as recovering from an illness. So, no engineering, but figuring out what we need to do and then deciding how to do it and making sure someone does it. Plus, communicate to all involved, committing to goals, setting goals. In short "management". I've loved it and this and will continue, but I still have engineering sickness. I wanted to make a package to make box diagrams. I did not communicate in the logs or at work, when the outcome would be too much unknown. I started to learn 2 programming languages; Lisp and Erlang. All off these, flight into save and known activities. Relapses into engineering.

So more convalescent therapy this year.

1. In our effort to build a working production machine we have a todo list per sub-project. This todo list contains for at least a year a work-item to figure our all the ways some system might faile. With the tool almost done we have still not made this list of "failure modes". [↩]

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 25th, 2020 at 08:55 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.