This week, and especially today, has felt like a grind. 

Code ebbs and flows better and worse. Some weeks and days have either been hyperproductive or a suffered a hundred paper cuts to make progress. 

Today, I dropped my kids off at their respective schools and hopped into a bi-monthly workgroup meeting as soon as I walked into the office. They needed me to make a quorum, and it’s one of those rotating meetings that conflicts with my kid’s drop-off schedules every other meeting. 

The meeting ended early, and I uploaded grant applications to our conference grant system before I uploaded them again because I forgot to add the extra questions. Two more uploads because of a missing Timestamp field that was a bug. I didn’t trust myself, so I uploaded it again. 

I went into client-work mode for the next few hours until a friend pinged me, and 20 minutes later, we posted a blog post announcement. 

I did more client work and ordered a quick lunch. Over lunch, I had a ping about our conference website, which was ready to go live, but we still needed to discuss the plan to launch it. I renamed one repository, created a new repository, and pushed changes from a third repository with some liberal GitHub Pages changes, and thankfully, everything just worked. 

One of my parents had a procedure today, so I got a call from my other parent telling me everything went well. That was a good weight off my shoulders.

I have a weekly writing group meeting on Thursdays that I forgot we weren’t meeting today (I think), so I got an extra hour of client work worked in more than my typical Thursday. 

Towards the end of the day, we have a weekly company banter/social hour that I joined late for. 

It ended early, and a few more conference website issues popped up. 

I stayed a little late and came home to see the family, eat dinner, and clean up afterward. The kids' grandfather from Chicago is in town for the weekend. 

After dinner, I worked on the newsletter, and every time I thought I was done, I would find one more thing that needed to be done off and on for the next 90 minutes. 

I remembered that I had rolled out a new release of the Job website this morning before work, and I thought to double-check it, which made me realize we had two new jobs to post to the newsletter. 

I rarely check Slack at night, but I had posted a message about rolling a new feature for one of our more popular libraries, so I merged three pull requests and created a fourth pull request to help clean things up. We’ll release it tomorrow. 

While checking GitHub notifications, I decided to check another project and realized I had missed a bug report about GitHub Auth needing to be fixed for the last day. I don’t know why they call it “depend"abot because it’s not. One third-party library rollback later, I pin to a previous version, deploy, test, and everything works again. 

Tonight, I realized that I still wanted to keep my writing streak up, so here we are. 

I’m not a fan of being busy, looking busy, or needing to feel busy, but every day has felt like this. 

Thankfully, tomorrow is Friday, and there are only two things on my calendar, including Office Hours, which I look forward to. 

We made friends, but it was quite a week.