Leaving me a Basket Case

Argh - sometimes you get those days/weeks/months where the whole rollercoaster is just too much.

Last week was one of those.  (this post even sat in a draft half-done state during the whole rollercoaster ride as I was too rattled even to finish off my post)

For a couple of weeks now, I've been left as the sole developer in charge of my project.  Ongoing for a period of 4 months while the senior is off on shared parental leave.

Now - some or maybe even many of the expectations I've got on me are my own, I have a list of things that I should be able to put work into fixing.  But, faced with the responsibility for it all on my own, all of a sudden the knowledge began to leak from my brains.  And, the more I worried about it, the more panic set in and the less I could think straight.  When asking colleagues to help, I didn't even understand the questions they were asking to help me, let alone their potential solutions. Argh!!

So - eventually - I opened up - not directly to the people I should have approached in the first place, but to helpful colleagues, one of which has been with me throughout the whole of this journey, from my early OU days, he was my 'Man that Can' for coding queries.  They agreed to provide some assistance, albeit from a distance, and encouraged me to meet properly with my own team managers and iron out what's actually expected of me rather than worrying over a self-imposed list of stuff to do that would 'prove myself' somehow.

Met with the managers at the start of this week, and I have the beginnings of a plan, some of which does still include working through my 'list', alongside a little additional work to help out another team.  In addition I've been working on some issues that happened in the 'live' system and doing a bit of preventative work to stop them happening again.  Ironically the stuff I'm working on is in an area of code which I previously saw as my weakest area, and my confidence there has grown massively.

I'm still double and triple-checking cos, you know, I'm still me at the end of the day... but I'm sure that confidence in my own code will come with time.