how do you motivate yourself after achieving a tight deadline?

Sustaining motivation is very very difficult, as I feel :-) Stretching yourself to complete work on time, to keep ruminating on what else needs to be done, all this drains a lot of energy. There is a great high in meeting the deadline, it is almost euphoric, liberating, morale boosting. This is the way I felt when I met the Rounders tourny deadline. It was a huge challenge and it took a lot of time and effort on my part, but it is done now. Time to move on to new targets, new deadlines. But then I forgot the recharge part :-) Forgot that I need to take a break, first, just to keep myself sane. There are other things I love to do other than work. Like playing with Kush or reading books or watching movies. And so I took it easy this week, fixing bugs and managing releases, but I also read "The Circular Staircase" and watched Rann and Ishqia. The book was good, kind of outdated now with all the twists and turns of plot painfully obvious now, but nonetheless a good read. Rann was bad, while Ishqia was good :-) And just when it looked like life is good again came the loan repayment request and so back again to all those mind numbing calculations :-)

living with pain

Once we decided that we had to return back from HEC to India, I had felt a stab of real pain, of disappointment, of fear of what lied ahead. I lived with that pain for some 3 months or so. It became a pain body of its own ( borrowing a term from Power of Now), it started dictating terms to me. Most of my interactions were based on fear. My life became shallow, very shallow, almost stupid. And then one day I had enough of it, so I let it be. I accepted that there were lot of unknowns in my life and lot of bitter sweet experiences lied ahead, and so I just felt it as it was. What happened next was exactly what was specified in Power of Now. Its hold on me gradually lessened and I started living more freely. I came to Goa, joined this company. I was told that people mocked me here. I just let it be. After some time, people started respecting me. After some more time, I was anointed the leader and people accepted me as their leader. Am I at peace here? My truthful answer would be both yes and no. I love my work here and it reflects in my work quality here. I still don't have money to repay loans, my lenders are getting fidgety and I feel bad about that. And that hurts some time.
I have to make a complete payment towards my home loan this month. And in 3 months of time, I have to repay my loan off one lender. All my hopes rest on that elusive bank loan. Imagine living every day with the hope of getting that loan and managing fears of getting rejected for the same. That stress, that pain gets reflected in all other aspects of one's life, eventually manifesting as some sort of disease. I am right now treading the same path and feeling the same stress. Will Eckhart's suggested exercises help me in managing this phase without causing any grievous impact on me or my health? Let us find that out.

why not test code after writing it?

This week has been spent on fixing bugs that other people introduced. Some of them have been very very difficult to find while some of them were just plain stupid. An example of a stupid bug is that just after tourny gets over, the winners get double of their win amount. Another example was that even if a player plays a play money tourny, his real chips (real money) account would be overwritten by play chips. These bugs are stupid bugs and result of lazy people, coders who just finish their coding and don't test it properly. This is not unique to this company here. I have run into this again and again, in all the companies that i have worked with. The main reason behind this sloppy work is the pressure that management applies on team to get the work done within some time window. But i still feel that this tantamounts to not getting the job done at all. I have pretty harsh opinions on this subject :-)
An example of a very very hard bug will be the one that Datta faced when testing with an id kentuckykid. When he was playing the tourny, suddenly his moves started getting dropped by the server while all the other messages were getting across fine. I went thru logs again and again to find that particular issue. He had logged in form one client, and then logged out, started out another client and was playing in the tourny w/o any issues or hassles. Suddenly at the time of table merge, he started facing this issue. I found that before he started facing these issues, he had tried logging in from the first client and had got the message that id was already logged in. And here, I found the issue. Exactly at this point, the previous presence was being marked as unauthenticated. The person who coded that had never bothered to test it. And left this mess. I spent 3 hours to find that bug and fixed it in 1 minute.
Well, the tourny is going great on Rounders. On 15th, we will have one final testing here to be personally tested by boss. So then from Monday, we start implementing 3 patti :-)

Tournament on Rounders working now !!!!!

After all these days, poring through the logs to find that one hint, one clue that will help unravel the mystery, going nuts going thru the code logic to check if anything is wrong with the code, I was finally able to crack the code !!!!
initially we only let 12 players play the tournament and we found that it was working great. In fact some people came down to praise our efforts. But there was scope for improvement. Finally fixed those issues too and so today 20 people joined in, there were 3 tables and we just let them play. Not even a single issue !!!! Seriously, this is a huge day :-)
Now onto the next part of the puzzle. Omaha games work, but omaha sit and go crashes. Why? that is for us to find out. maybe the issue is with client, may be with server. Wait till next week...
Because this week was a 6 day week, I have been unable to start working on Tom Jerry game. Tomorrow I will spend some time on it.
On other note, I finished 5.1 something by Chetan Bhagat. OKish kind of novel, total time pass. The movie 3 idiots had some scenes inspired by the book, otherwise the book and movie don't have much in common.
On Friday, Kush was supposed to go on a picnic. I went against it as the picnic was being arranged on a spot where shade is a rarity and Goa has very very hot afternoons these days. I was concerned about it and so didn't allow him to go. And you know what, his teacher called up asking about his absence. Apparently they missed him a lot. I don't know, was I being too over protective? Should I have let him go? I need to think about over protection thing. I don't want to become helicopter parent making my child a cripple, unable to face life's challenges. Need to seriously think about it.