The Zone

I was in the Zone today at work. I haven't had that feeling for a while.

There's something about everything snapping into place, and realizing that I'm really GOOD at what I do, when I love what I'm doing. Because of understaffing, people's personal issues, and the fact that my boss is starting to realize that I'm someone who gets things done, I've been assigned the work of roughly three people.

Today, I worked for about 13 hours straight. I didn't surf the web, I didn't read the news, any of the stuff I normally do. I didn't even notice the passing of time. I wrote 800 lines of professional, functional, debugged, error checked code. I basically finished an entire command line utility that is going to ship in Solaris 10. And I did it all on 4 hours of sleep, five cans of soda, and three double espressos. Heh.

And the thing is, even though I was tired, and wanted to just pass out, I still loved it. I have friends who sit at desk jobs, and surf the web all day, and chat with their friends, and they talk about how great it is. That kind of mind-numbing monotony would drive me insane. Work has been killing me for the last few months, as we drive toward unrealistic and looming deadlines, in the mad rush to make the last build before they slam the Solaris 10 gate closed, leaving us shivering in the cold, clutching our precious project.

There was a moment around the middle that everything just clicked into place, and I blew away hundreds of useless lines, and everything became clean, and streamlined, and beautiful. God damn, that felt good. After a while, you get a feel for what really works. I never got that in school, but I've been writing so much code in the last few months that correct form is really starting to congeal in my head. It used to be that I would think about a problem and try to figure out how to solve it. Now, solutions come immediately, and the hard part is picking the best one.

For a long time at Sun, I felt outclassed by the experience and knowledge that these people have, their years of experience and their in depth grasp of networking, and coding, and operating systems, and algorithms. And I still ask a lot of questions. In fact, I ask them all the time. But I don't feel outclassed anymore, because even though a lot of these older engineers know more than me, I can design and implement right up there with them. I can solve problems intuitively, and match patterns from elsewhere in the operating system. And I can do it quickly, and efficiently, and without supervision of any kind.

So forgive me if this was a bit of a weird post, I'm still buzzed from the day, and a bit drunk, not ready to sleep because I've not gotten to relax yet. It was just a pretty amazing day, and it's difficult to explain. Ah well. Shortly, I'm going to blast you all with some offensive links I've just found, and then I'm going to go sit on my couch, open a beer or four, and watch Cowboy Bebop.