Closing in on 10am. Rushing through the morning, like a whirlwind, stirring a lot of different things all at once, throwing some, breaking others. Now to get a big broom and solid gloves. With these fragments, there's always a good chance of profoundly cutting fingers. (And in some cases, even metaphors hurt.)
Far beyond 10pm again. Crossing common thresholds faster these days, looking back and wondering where the hours went. Still counting lines of code, still trying to match outcomes to expectations and trying to find what causes the gaps in between. The wearing-down of late days, the tiredness of early nights, the growing inability to stay up late that seems to come with the years.
4pm and slowly on. Fixing other peoples problems, at least showing the will to. At some point a good solution is what remains once you took all the tries that could fail and hopefully fix more than they break. Which only leaves it a matter of time. And patience. And some remaining hair that could turn grey in course of this.
Close to 4pm. Technical calls, fixing broken pieces, finding ways through profoundly unchartered territory again. Surprised where the path ends. Also: The painful insight that in most cases things seem to end up lost as soon as someone starts adding the label "experience" to rather profane day-to-day tasks. But maybe it needs that kind of verbal upcycling, in some situations.
10am and on. A different kind of quietness in intermediate days. A street, even more empty by now. Janitor on the other side's having a coffee and a cigarette in the sun, some people are out there carrying huge shopping bags, and on the corner balcony, a young student in a rabbit-ear hoodie seems into learning, hidden halfway behind a laptop display bearing a glowing fruit. The morning, too: Digging deeper into technology. Rubber duck kind of debugging, and the duck doesn't understand either. There's still work to be done today.
Closing in on 11am. Running into wires drawn months ago, which seems ages by todays standards. There's always some flaky infrastructure on one end of these, and there's always a deep dark hole to get lost within while trying to dig to the core of the problem. (Also: The fun of issues that disappear just by deleting log history or viewing configuration files. Things being indistinguisable from magic again...)
(The morning, too: Just partially ready for work. Keeping paper trail, for whatever it's worth. And trying to get a rough plan shaped from the things still at hand. Reliance on tools vs robustness of tools. How long until my pencil breaks?)