Hell Week in Software Development
I was reading David Stewart’s blog and I was so intrigued by his “Surviving Hell Week” post. It reminded me of a similar experience of mine long time ago when I was an undergraduate student. Interestingly, we both had the same feelings and reached similar conclusions. Therefore, I’ll share the story with you and then I’ll discuss some of the insightful lessons.
It was my third semester in school. Ramy Mostafa, a friend of mine, and I registered for a class called “Visual Programming”. The professor of this class decided that we should use Java for the class projects. At this time, neither Ramy nor I had any experiences with Java. When it was time to announce the projects, the professor offered a number of them that were pretty easy to finish in probably 3 days. But he gave us 2 weeks till the deadline.
Our team, Ramy and I, were still kinda young and very excited, motivated, enthused, and love challenges (are these enough adjectives 
? ). So, we thought about implementing a digital circuit design application similar to Xilinx. We took the idea to the professor after 4 days were passed from the project time. The professor said that there is no way we are going to finish this project on time. I am not sure if he knew it or not, but all what he did was that he put us on FIRE to get this thing done in 10 days. And that was our hell 10 days.
He stayed in my house and we started designing, learning about the language, researching, implementing, testing, … etc. NON-STOP. I remember that we slept for about 2 hours every two or three days. And we decided to not sleep at the same time. One of us sleeps while the other is working. This way, the project is always in progress. All of our nutrition came from fast food delivery sandwiches. At the very last day we weren’t still done. We were very close to finishing the digital circuit design part with wiring algorithms …etc. It takes about an hour to drive from my home to school. We took a cab and we kept working on my laptop during this hour. To go to the class room, we had to walk around 15 minutes. So, one of us walked backwards holding the laptop while the other was actually typing on it. We made it JUST on time.
The result? Well, it is one of the BEST projects that was ever implemented in this class. Were we tired? Let’s just say that I was drained. I could hardly think, walk, or open my eyes. I lost a ton of weight in 10 days than I really wanted to. Was it worthy? I wouldn’t change anything about it. We were thrilled and full of happiness and pride. This was the best time in my life with software development.
So, what did I learn from this experience?
- Software developers STRIVE for a challenge. They’d do something extra-ordinary if they wanted to.
- When you are young, you can do so many things that you’d think twice about doing it as you grow older. So, don’t waste a minute of it.
- A smile or a word of appreciation worth all the world to a developer that spent a lot of time and effort on a piece of software.
- With the right team members, you’d do things that would impress even yourself.
Has any of you had any similar experiences? What do you guys feel about such experiences?
Please, share you thoughts !!!
