Yes, I do sleep
Several people have now said to me things like “do you sleep?”, “you are a machine” and “you work too hard”. It’s become apparent I’m giving the impression that I’m some sort of superhuman, one man working machine and I just felt that I should explain myself a bit because this is definitely not the way I see things. I am beginning to fear I’m giving the wrong impression and I also began to doubt that the hours i put in were in any way ‘normal’. Allow me to try and clear things up a little.
Explain yourself @mcaulay
While it is true that I do spend a lot of hours in front of various machines banging out code, tweaking designs, fiddling with servers and so on and so forth, it’s not that often at the expense of the time I spend with my family and friends. I do sometimes stay up way too late or get up at an altogether silly hour to ‘get some work in’ and there’s a very good reason for this. Some of the people I know who do the same kinds of work as me also know this reason. Some of them also do a similar number of hours as me, it’s just that I probably bang on about it a bit more on twitter!
Passion
I am delighted that I get to do what I do for a living. Every hour I get to work in web development I count as some kind of blessing. I love tinkering with stuff, I love building stuff and I love launching stuff and seeing what the reactions are. I also like to surprise people with added ‘extra touches’ whether that’s by spending way too much time on a slick button, adding an unexpected bit of interaction, if I’ve stealthily written the whole thing in HTML5 and let the secret out at a later date or maybe even served it up on nginx rather than apache, whatever. As long as I can do a bit more than is *expected* I’m happy. I love building stuff on the web, I just cant express that enough.
Learning
I think that one of the most important parts of working on the web is to never stop learning. Never stop pushing yourself and never ever think ‘that’ll do’ about your work. Improvement and self improvement are so fundamentally important to what is maybe the fastest moving industry there is, that the minute you stop investing time in learning, you risk being left behind by those who don’t stop. I try to add at least an hour of learning onto every day. Admittedly this particular part of my day more than often comes at the expense of sleep.
This is why you’ll find me up at an hour that many people aren’t, this is why I probably talk too much about what I’m doing and this is why I will continue to do the same and probably more in future. With so many people unhappy and even miserable with their jobs, I count myself extremely fortunate to be able to say that I absolutely love what I do, and that’s really all there is to it. Anyone feel the same?
