roy

I made it to the finish line: Friday! This week was a black-eye week - one of our professional service contracts just unraveled at its seams. Building out a professional services arm is hard. Besides the inherent difficulty of working with customers, there's an added difficulty when you're working with a complex product like Deki, which can be tasked to do many different things. The important lesson learned: understand what your customer is trying to achieve, rather than framing the project based on what Deki does well.

For me, the hardest part of building out this team has been just the number of context-switches I have to do per day. Factoring in engineering/product decisions, I have to constantly shift between different mindsets - this customer project, that customer project, (trying to) drive the next release, etc. I'm still trying to serve double duty by making sure things run smoothly on the development side ... it's made it very difficult for me to focus - I've had to relegate activities which require my attention span for longer than fifteen minute bursts at home (piano).

On a personal note, I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but I cannot stay asleep anymore. I keep waking up at ridiculously early hours (like 7am), regardless of when I went to bed the night before. I've been physiologically unable to sleep-in, even on the weekends. I originally thought it was the East Coast time difference, but it's stuck. I've also lost my appetite as of late - my meals have been tiny (a couple of bites, and that's it).

But life is good. So I don't understand it. I'm guessing there's some latent stress (as much as I try not to be) from work. Fortunately, many of our smaller professional services projects are wrapping up, so we can focus on a huge whopper of a deal we're working through. All these projects wrap up at the end of November, so that should bring a huge relief to me.

Like so many other times, I find myself looking hopefully to the immediate future for respite. But unlike other times, this time I'm cautiously optimistic (but that's probably for other reasons).