Nimble Gecko

Recently I have stumbled upon a great book on how to build a "Software as a Service" business. Although "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's guide to Launching a Startup" (here's e-book version) focuses primarily on the business side of things, there's a great deal of insights related to your typical, run-of-the-mill IT job. Book's author Rob Walling did a very good job at spotting certain patterns present in everyday reality of a programmer and describing those in details.

All too often we find ourselves trying to solve a problem for hours. You may have googled your problem, spoken to people, tried this and that. But nothing really worked. Sometimes you try the same solution twice or three times in a row, secretly hoping that it will work. This can feel like running in circles. And god forbid somebody asks you “How long do you reckon it’s going to take?”, since you immediately feel like going for their throat. The worst bit is that you may feel really exhausted and not motivated at all to do anything at this point.

Around a year ago I started a sort of socio-psychological experiment. Not a real one: no control groups, not a double blind one, no checking for confounds. Heck, even no data collection in its strict sense.

You probably know the pattern. People say to themselves: "Boy I hate my work. I so want to quit and never go back to this kind of stuff! I wish I could just do knitting or something". So you decide that you had enough of this shit. But then your cerebellum freaks out. You may even hear his adult voice saying: "Hold it right there young man. What do you think you're doing? You have bills to pay, family to feed and that fat mortgage which makes your bank happy".