How Do You Measure Progress?
I spent weeks working on a piece of software that accomplished something I’d never done before. On a precise schedule, it would pick up a file from one semi-aged computer system, translate it into something an even older system could use, grab some more information, and push all of that into a third, newer system.
Everything worked flawlessly, right up until the point that we officially went live on the system.
My Fort Knox of code turned into a seeming house of cards that came crashing down. Nothing worked the way it did during testing.
I haven’t resolved the issue fully yet. Somewhere, buried in thousands of lines of code, is something that regularly stops the whole operation in its tracks.
Okay, that’s a bit dramatic. There’s a manual import process that can be used to get around the issue until I figure out what’s going on.
From a progress standpoint, it’s interesting how just before things toppled, I felt like I had made tremendous progress. Now that things aren’t working, there’s a sense that I never made any progress at all.
Of course, that’s not true.
In the flow of time, the future becomes the present and the present the past quite literally with each passing microsecond. In the passage of time, we have a tendency to over-inflate the…
