Now, I don’t want you to think that the company did the smart thing and pushed off some of our other heavy development projects to be worked on after the release of the new platform. Oh, no. This new platform has been added to our outstanding work load. While the development team with the corporate office up in Portland has enough resources to dedicate less than half of the team to this project, there are only two developers for the subsidiary company that I work for, so the two of us have to take on the entire load. It was only because one of the major projects turned out to be a Corporate effort instead of a local one that it was pushed off until a later date, after this next platform release; otherwise, we would have been developing this integration for our old platform while at the same time building a second instance for the new platform.

And since the other Granite Bay developer and I need to work closely with the developers up in Portland, it was decided that he and I would have to work face to face with them.

This, of course, means returning to Portland, OR, on a weekly basis. For the past two weeks bits of our local development team been flying back up to work with the development team up there on this release. My schedule has been pretty regular: during the day I have meetings with developers and managers and business partners to get our many projects underway, and at night I sit in my hotel room and code. This past week I arrived in Portland on Monday and worked up to fifteen hours per day on these projects. I had hoped desperately that I could work from home on Friday but in a team status conference call on Wednesday I was asked to participate in two meetings — one on the status of a new product that I’ve been implementing, and one with my boss so that he can help me figure out how to manage future partner integrations with our product. The first could probably have been done in a conference call from home, but the second needs to be done in person. And so working from home isn’t really an option.

This all explains why it is that I haven’t updated this journal in over two weeks. I simply haven’t had time. When I’m not on the plane or in a hotel coding away like a mad dog I’m sitting in my house with Jennifer recovering from these 60 to 70 hour work weeks. Actually, "sitting and recovering" isn’t quite right; with the wedding and the house coming up there’s very little time to sit and recover from anything.

And, in fact, this entry, written in a rush on Friday morning just before I run out the door to get to work for another very long day, needs to be cut short. The best part of this current round of travel — which I hope will end after next week when the new release is staged on QA — is that so far I’ve managed to miss the rolling blackouts which have hit California in this power crunch. And this upcoming week, I hope that I get a chance to night ski with some of the other developers at Mount Hood. We’ll see what happens.

Be well, take care, and let’s hope that I get to write some more this weekend. For a new year, century, and millenium, this journal hasn’t taken an exciting new start.