Some things are going great

If a little pessimism has crept into my posts over the last few weeks, it's because I really did want to put the Q behind me. Actually, that's an understatement. I wanted to crush it and use that result to get the best faculty members on my committee en route to a dissertation of some consequence.

Well, that may still happen, but only if I wait until February to take it. Work has simply been overwhelming and, even if I am able to pass the exam in ten days, it would be "as one escaping through the flames" as the apostle Paul so aptly put it.

However, that work thing has not been entirely one-sided. Yes, it's pretty much destroyed my life in the short term, but that's pretty much the nature of IT work. The only way to distinguish yourself in this field is by being willing to drop everything when the situation calls for it. And, the situation has called for it. As a result, I've scored some pretty big wins at the office:

• Our annual summer release (always our most stressful) went without incident.
• A month after go-live, we've had no significant production issues. I did have to work two weekends (the final nails in the Q prep coffin) to work through some data quality issues, but those were problems at the source, not with our stuff.
• We closed our second successful iteration (of two) on the project to rehost all our reporting to a scalable platform (Hadoop/Impala/AtScale).
• Primarily as a result of the last item, the members of my team are begging to stay rather than be transferred off. We normally rotate assignments so people don't get burned out, but the developers are really eager to move onto the new technology stack.

So, even if it does knock me down a rung at school, the last couple months have certainly improved my standing at work. I was doing pretty well on both fronts coming into the summer. It will be easier to repair damage on the school side.