A project, 10 months in the making with a strategic partner. Five public phased launches (numero uno from January!). In synchronicity with the phased launches of WRG, the engineering team at MindTouch developed one of the most compelling features of MindTouch; the fruition which was launched tonight in the form of a public, moderated wiki... just as MediaWiki announces they're gonna do the same thing.

The ending to these projects always seems so anti-climatic. They always seem to end at 1am, and everybody is just too exhausted to care. There have been more late nights than I care to count lately.

The whole project was incredibly informative; not only in opening up our eyes on how far our platform can be pushed, but also in exposing places where we need to focus more attention. It's also been quite informative in how to grow and manage a professional services team and how we should try to structure our partner relationships in the future.

Working on projects like this just reinforce the fact that I work with some amazingly talented people. Of course, these projects also manage to sap a ton of energy - trying to manage these strategically important projects with a limitd team while running the engineering team wasn't so easy. Even now, I know there's a lot of work that needs to be done on the product side... And now that this project has (nearly) ended, I'm looking at even more projects in the pipeline I need to manage. It never ends.

On a more pessimistic note, it has also underlined how unsustainable my current work levels are. Already this week I've had one 4am emergency, coupled with two late nights. Thoughts of life sans-MindTouch have been popping up with far more frequency lately (hit an irrationally dangerous level last week - almost threw in my three weeks notice - bad stress!). I've probably been reaching a burnout point on and off for the past year - I didn't realize how bad it was until I took that trip to China back in May. I had to be forced away from my computer to realize how pervasive this job had been. That feeling of the freedom afforded by traveling (well-timed weddings!) is probably why I've been flying around so much.

I had a nice chat last week with one of the uppers last week, indicating that it was probably wise of the company to limit the risk of my departure by more actively devolving me of my responsibilities - I'd be remiss in my duties if my departure left things in a tenuous state. We'll see how it goes; I guess I'll be on the hiring warpath over the coming few weeks to fill as many roles as possible (a process which has been rather disappointing - craigslist seems void of quality developers).

Guess that even with the sweet, you get a lot of bitterness...