Looking back, some of my most enjoyable things I’ve done have been challenging projects:
- Working at Future Platforms to build one of the UK’s earliest dating apps.
- Completing my MA.
- Working as a ‘technical liaison’ on a project with an ambitiously short deadline in 2017.
- Being involved with the Cerne-to-CERN pilgrimage and setting up an online radio station for it.
I see certain things in common here – all of these items were ambitious goals with a fixed deadline and required hard work and collaboration. This is true even of the MA – while the work was solo, I made a lot of good friends on the course, and we all discussed our projects and supported each other.
One of the things I’m always telling people in agile projects is that you should look at the past to shape the future. Looking back here, some of the best experiences I’ve had have involved well-defined projects that I was dedicated to. Each of these took a significant investment of time of energy, over a fixed duration. And, for each of them, the goal was clear.
So: I should look for more projects like these, or consider seeing how I can make the things I want to do into such projects.
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Similar thoughts were on my mind as I worked on the Lost Doctor annual, thinking to myself “I haven’t had this much fun since we used to pull all-nighters getting websites out the door in the 1990s”.
I miss those all nighters too!
Yeah, my last few jobs in the industry were very good at protecting employees from the need to do stuff like that, and I appreciate the need for such protection but, damn, such magic missed.