The little things...

Working straight out for a number of weeks takes its toll, but the little things help relieve some of the stress. Like finding out that one in every five posts on the KnowledgeTree forums are by me. And like having two days allocated to fixing bugs and adding improvements to KT.

Including, showing an error if the installation doesn't support InnoDB tables, so we don't get weird "that can't happen!" stuff happening on other people's computers.

And cleaning up the various caches when people upgrade, which leads to a few too many other "that can't happen!" moments.

Brad is helping with managing our team (and teaching both of us respect for the work necessary to do so at the same time), and one of the simple outputs I now have on my desk is a simple week view of what I need to achieve. Not a scary project plan for three months (that is already out of date in a week) - just the week. It gives me a certain confidence and sense of accomplishment in seeing what I need to do and that it can be done.

And, in Brad's ultra-abridged format of the standard team meeting, I got to hear what the rest of the team did in the previous week, and what they're doing in the next week, and what the big things in their lives are. Maybe it's that they're saying less that I'm noticing what they're saying more. I guess I'm not turning off because they're going on about technical details I could care less about (I imagine that they feel the same way about the stuff that I generally talk about).

Instead I feel a sense of accomplishment from their work (without knowing the nitty-gritty) and of confidence that we're all pulling our weight and heading towards a common goal (ick, did I say "towards a common goal"?).

And with that in mind, my willingness to contribute time to save them time increases. Okay, maybe not sufficiently to actually do it yet, but the willingness is increasing.

And I feel I respect the challenges they face more, and their ability to tackle them as well.

All by having them say less - by not going into unnecessary detail, by only talking about the major issues, and focusing on the short term (past week, next week)? I wonder if I'm weird or if this can be used for normal people too.

And then there's the little thing of learning to let go. We decided to get help from a company to do our installers in future. What a concept - pay less money than it would cost to do it yourself, and get something better than you could do yourself in less time than it would take to do it yourself. I find it hard in general to trust other people to do things, but so far this looks like a no-brainer.