The last road trip that I took this February took me through Dallas, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Denver and Nashville. It was highly enjoyable (especially seeing my cousin and his family in Denver, complete with kick-ass 5th row seats to watch the Pens beat the Avs), but the enjoyment was tempered by the fact that I knew when coming back, I had to launch to production a six month project that was already delayed, and with less than perfect confidence that it would be successful. There was also the outside chance that if the production launch failed, I’d eventually get fired.
As it turned out, it was successful. The development team was responsible for ‘Tier 1 support” for the first two weeks after launch (which for all intents and purposes meant I was personally on the line for any production issues 24/7 during that time), and I put the over/under count on the number of fixes we would need to promote at 7. We actually passed that the first day, but they were all very minor configuration-level issues that didn’t cause any harm to the end users (and which weren’t that surprising given that the overall system of which my project launch was a part involved 6-8 other teams (depending on how you count it)). On more than one occasion during the two-week warranty period, I asked the PM if he was sure the code was migrated.
This time around, I’m heading out on an even longer road trip. Though there is a lot of important work that awaits my return, I had the added bonus of resolving (with assistance) of a significant production issue that threatened to put a damper on the whole thing (short story: a query went from taking 50 minutes down to 1 second. And it was not because it wasn’t safe by default…..).
This trip will take me to, in order: Vegas, LA, San Jose, Seattle, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary.
I’m hoping my new MacBook Air proves to be a good machine. I intend to do some development work along the way (there’s a phrase I can’t remember that is relevant here. Something about “snowball” and “hell.” I’m blanking on it), so I hope it stands up to it.