same_difference (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
same_difference) wrote2010-07-30 12:13 am
same_difference) wrote2010-07-30 12:13 am
Working better under pressure
So it's been a while since I updated, largely it's because things have been very busy or tiring generally. I seem to often have two of either time, energy or money, to do what I want or need to, but rarely all three together when two of them isn't enough.
Work is very much all go for the moment, there's quite a lot of pressure, not as bad as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dantarian whose having to do (paid) overtime, but I've found myself staying a little later occasionally to get things working for the first time at my employer. Something under normal circumstances I wouldn't do, my time once I've done with work is mine not my employers. It's one of the things I like about the company until you hit project management level voluntary overtime is not expected, the company wants to charge the customer for every bit of time you spent working for them if they can. The thing is I'm working much better on this project now that I have been before at my job. Clearly actually being under some pressure is good thing for my work.
Of course as I've found with being on the test team, a good day productive day for me is a bad day for someone else. Having a very effective someone else's problem field helps though, means I can happily walk away from the problem once I've identified it and it's been passed onto the developers to fix.
Take today for example. About half my day was trying to work out why one of the pieces of software we're developing wasn't deploying on the web-server software we're using. We'd had a previous issue with occasional memory leak like problems, and identified as likely being caused by using a different Java virtual machine to the one the developers were working against. So I'd updated the JVM to the correct one and one of the applications on one of the servers worked fine, the other just failed to start. Queue much wrangling with our very over stressed build machine (including it getting a RAM upgrade part way though*) and trying different revisions of the software trying to identify the problem before trying different installations of the web-server when the former hadn't worked. Now the test team are using the version of the web-server software the customer will use, the development team haven't move to it because the test team we're checking it was OK first. Turns out the software we're developing works fine on the old version of the web-server and either JVM, and on the new version and the wrong JVM (well other than the memory issues), but doesn't work with the new Web-server software and correct JVM.
I went from worrying I'd messed something up changing the JVM, to having the warm glow of having found a really major issue and knowing it wasn't my responsibility to try and sort it :)
*The advantage of being on the important high priority project is a lot of the usual barriers seem to have vanished.
With home life well I've got into this system of finding an equilibrium point between chores, house renovation work, rest and hobbies where I'm managing to do enough of all the above. Then once there I stay at it for a couple of weeks before adding something new to it, and trying to juggle it till I've found a new equilibrium. Repeating until I run out of other things I should be doing. It seems to be working, but I'm still somewhat in the juggling phase and so I'm finding I'm just not fitting some things in, largely at the moment LJ, but also replying to some long running email conversations.
I hope to be able to do more of both of them soon.
In other news Rachael made a Toblerone cheese cake with about 0.5Kg of Toblerone in, tomorrow we get to eat it. That will be a very good day :) Whoever decided to make the 31st of July Cheesecake Day thank you, we will be celebrating it properly.
Work is very much all go for the moment, there's quite a lot of pressure, not as bad as
dantarian whose having to do (paid) overtime, but I've found myself staying a little later occasionally to get things working for the first time at my employer. Something under normal circumstances I wouldn't do, my time once I've done with work is mine not my employers. It's one of the things I like about the company until you hit project management level voluntary overtime is not expected, the company wants to charge the customer for every bit of time you spent working for them if they can. The thing is I'm working much better on this project now that I have been before at my job. Clearly actually being under some pressure is good thing for my work. Of course as I've found with being on the test team, a good day productive day for me is a bad day for someone else. Having a very effective someone else's problem field helps though, means I can happily walk away from the problem once I've identified it and it's been passed onto the developers to fix.
Take today for example. About half my day was trying to work out why one of the pieces of software we're developing wasn't deploying on the web-server software we're using. We'd had a previous issue with occasional memory leak like problems, and identified as likely being caused by using a different Java virtual machine to the one the developers were working against. So I'd updated the JVM to the correct one and one of the applications on one of the servers worked fine, the other just failed to start. Queue much wrangling with our very over stressed build machine (including it getting a RAM upgrade part way though*) and trying different revisions of the software trying to identify the problem before trying different installations of the web-server when the former hadn't worked. Now the test team are using the version of the web-server software the customer will use, the development team haven't move to it because the test team we're checking it was OK first. Turns out the software we're developing works fine on the old version of the web-server and either JVM, and on the new version and the wrong JVM (well other than the memory issues), but doesn't work with the new Web-server software and correct JVM.
I went from worrying I'd messed something up changing the JVM, to having the warm glow of having found a really major issue and knowing it wasn't my responsibility to try and sort it :)
*The advantage of being on the important high priority project is a lot of the usual barriers seem to have vanished.
With home life well I've got into this system of finding an equilibrium point between chores, house renovation work, rest and hobbies where I'm managing to do enough of all the above. Then once there I stay at it for a couple of weeks before adding something new to it, and trying to juggle it till I've found a new equilibrium. Repeating until I run out of other things I should be doing. It seems to be working, but I'm still somewhat in the juggling phase and so I'm finding I'm just not fitting some things in, largely at the moment LJ, but also replying to some long running email conversations.
I hope to be able to do more of both of them soon.
In other news Rachael made a Toblerone cheese cake with about 0.5Kg of Toblerone in, tomorrow we get to eat it. That will be a very good day :) Whoever decided to make the 31st of July Cheesecake Day thank you, we will be celebrating it properly.