Kurt McKee

lessons learned in production

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Twelve days later

Posted 19 April 2015 in feedparser, life, programming, snowscape, and work

It's been twelve days since my shoulder surgery so I thought I'd post a summary of what I've been up to.

In the first 24 hours there was an issue that cropped up at work. The problem was caused by an update to some software released by another group in the company, and, as frequently happens, I had warned the responsible group several months in advance that this was a potential problem. Nevertheless, in the first 24 hours after surgery I was remotely troubleshooting and releasing an update to my software to work around the issue.

I then spent the rest of the week writing my own static website generator. The purpose is explicitly to learn about some technologies that I haven't had a reason to learn about in my professional work, like virtualenv, blinker, and jinja2. After a week I had a pretty solid, extensible architecture and the beginnings of a website theme. This may grow beyond a simple learning exercise.

This week I picked up feedparser development again. The virtualenv exposure from last week helped a lot, and I finally learned how to handle remote git repositories. Then I packaged up a new feedparser release and published it.

As one of my friends joked last night, "Even crippled and high you're still more productive than half of the people on my team," a tongue-in-cheek reference to having one arm immobilized and taking narcotic painkillers they give you when they modify what your bicep attaches to.

Throughout the first week I found it difficult to focus: the oxycodone regimen afforded me only a few hours of lucidity each day. I don't enjoy that. This second week I've been skipping the painkillers as much as possible and have been sober now for about 36 hours. Unfortunately, I'm now experiencing frequent dull headaches. Ah well.

Oh! And I'm going for walks now when I manage to tie my shoelaces. Recovery's going well, and life is good.

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