Software Writer’s Block
I didn’t know software developers could suffer from writer’s block, until I accepted a commission to develop a piece of software that should have amounted to about 10 man days’ work. The project took me over a year of elapsed time to complete, and many more than 10 man days of effort, with false starts, dead ends and troublesome issues. If I didn’t know it before, I am certain now that software development is an art, an intensely creative process, but an exact art. The process is part scientific, but largely an intuitive monster lurking somewhere in a dark recess of the unconscious. I never really knew where the software comes from – it just happens. If it is forced too hard, it disappears. The only way to get it back is not to try.
In the past, I’d had episodes of a few days, even weeks, when I found it difficult to make progress on a piece of software. This time caught me hard and deep. Delivery deadlines – as Douglas Adams would have it – made that lovely whooshing sound as they went sailing past. The harder I tried to work on the thing, the less I seemed able to accomplish anything.
It didn’t help that in the middle of all this, I broke an ankle and was completely out of action in hospital for 3 weeks, in a plaster cast for 6 weeks, and on a slow slope to recover over 6 months and beyond. This only added to the pressure. One might think that developing software would be an excellent pastime while immobilized with a fracture, but little things get in the way and it is so, so difficult when you can’t quite get comfortable and you can’t do much for yourself. Software development requires total concentration, difficult in perfect conditions, impossible in challenging times. I was under stress from all angles, business and personal and the pressure grew and grew.
As you can imagine, my customer was not the happiest of bunnies! Customer relations suffered. The relationship was strained to breaking point and at one stage, I had given up on the project completely. I stopped trying. And then, some amazing things happened, stars and planets aligned, there were seismic shifts in my relationships with various people and in my mental processes. My customer must have realized what was happening, even before I really did, because I perceived a change in that relationship too. Whether calculated, or the desperate act of someone about to abandon hope, perhaps I will never know. But the ‘letting go’ worked. The pressure evaporated, and forward progress recommenced. Still not fast, but steady and sure.
That 10-day, year-long herculean labour is now complete. It feels good. My Mojo is back!