Derik Badman's Journal

As often happens I am behind at work. We do this process where we plan 3 weeks of code issues to work on and we estimate the issue by "points" so that we have a certain amount of points to do per 3 week "sprint". The "points" are supposed to be an abstract measuring of effort, but by using them as a basis for how much work we are supposed to do in a period of time they become a de facto measure of time. It's a frustrating process for anything that is not clear cut. When there are surprises or complicated issues, estimating the work becomes very difficult and then one gets behind (because the desire is for things to happen faster, so of course I (and others I think) end up underestimating way more than we overestimate.

So my current work was much more complicated than I expected (and I already knew it was going to be complicated) so now I'm behind which makes me more stressed out than usual, unaided by the server issue yesterday that I ended up spending most of the morning on. On the plus side, I've been learning and using some new features in node, in particular async/await functions. I actually started using them for the static site generator I'm working on, but ended up also using them a lot for this work issue.

Was thinking yesterday about how I don't (and haven't, historically speaking) written much about music. Music has been a big part of my life in different ways since I was very young, but somehow it is rarely something I think about in the same way I think about books or comics. I only recall one time I wrote about music, which was a short piece I wrote about Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music for the long defunct Philadelphia Independent. Rereading it, I see that it was for a post-election issue of 2004, which at the time seemed like a depressing election... I spend a lot of time listening to music and with songs running through my head, so maybe I'll try writing about music some more in the future.