This is a concept I have been pondering lately (and not just from a personal perspective). To be clear on the concept, here’s the idea: what would you do differently right now, if you knew in 6 months you would be killed in an accident (and not a terminal illness)?
Personally the answer that we all come up tends to be the same. Spend more time with family and friends. Have more fun. Maybe, join a religion or get deeper in the one that you subscribe to(you gotta worry about the afterlife if you believe in one.. which obviously I do).
Professionally though, you might think a little differently. For instance I was tweeting this last week and Steve Hebert (can’t find your blog anymore man) responded…
To summarize him he said that he would find a fun project and forget about unit testing on it (no point if you are dying in the not too distant future… it’s someone else’ problem… ) Interestingly enough I would say the opposite. Now to make it really weird, Steve is probably more in that realm than I am.. My suspicion for why this is has something to do with our current teams. My current team is in many respects very inexperienced; I’d bet the team Steve would pick for himself or who he would have in mind working with him isn’t. My reasons for wanting to do more is that I would want my team to have a better understanding of my code.
Anyway, for me the more critical fact is that I would probably doing less development on my team.. Seriously, I’d be investing a lot more time into my team helping them grow.
If I took the fun route, I’d be working on probably PocketCBZ or one of my other “fun” projects (which by the way have no unit tests in them)..
How about you?
Print | posted on Wednesday, July 15, 2009 2:22 PM