Not all days are equally productive. Not all days are equally interesting.
A project can’t be summarised as a straight line, no matter how hard PMs and delivery managers try. It’s intrinsic to the work. It has ebbs and flows, and the journey from the first discovery task to the final cleanup ticket is a rocky one.
This week has been one of those sleepy, tricky stretches.
My Jira board looks fairly empty and in good shape overall. It isn’t overflowing, and everything seems to be moving. But this week it’s all in the intangibles. The side tasks, the small polishes, the chats and meetings needed to sign things off. It’s the kind of week where I reach the evening knackered despite barely having sat in front of my IDE.
I used to struggle a lot with this feeling. My sense of worth was too tied to how much I worked, how many lines of code I produced, how much tangible progress I could point to. But sometimes it just doesn’t work like that, and I had to learn that the hard way.
I’ve been in this world long enough now to understand that estimates can’t only cover the time you need to build something. There’s the obvious stuff, like testing and deploying. But then you start learning about all the hidden things that quietly eat your time.
Every project has those sneaky dependencies where it isn’t only about you. You need your work signed off, or you’re waiting on data from another team, or you need a clarification before you can move. Just handling these things takes time, and that’s before you factor in everyone else’s busy schedule.
This week, for example, got thrown off by an incident another team was managing. It required some data investigation, which pulled in the exact colleague I needed to review and sign off a piece of work we’d been fixing together. The result was a couple of days of delay, a missed delivery window, and tickets spilling into the next sprint.
The old me would have stressed about this endlessly. It’s not that I don’t care now. I’ve just learned to navigate these waters. I know it happens, I know it’s inevitable, and you simply have to deal with it. And in my experience, the best medicine is proactivity.
I don’t sit around twiddling my thumbs. I do whatever is in my power to shrink the dependency down to its core, regardless of whose domain it technically falls in. Wherever possible, I do as much of the surrounding work myself so that what’s left for someone else is the quickest possible check. Ideally a simple yes or no.
At the same time, I don’t let things drift. People are busy, and even when something is my top priority, it probably isn’t theirs. So I’m careful to stay polite and not become a nuisance, but I don’t let things hang around too long either. I chase gently. I flag what’s blocked, or better still, what could become a blocker before it does. Communication is a soft skill I think is badly underrated among developers. It goes a long way, as long as you can work in a team without being an arse about it.
And finally, I’m genuinely starting to understand that I am not my commit count or my lines of code. Which is just as well, given AI agents now write most of my code while I spend my days reviewing it. But even beyond that. On the days that are mostly meetings, huddles and diplomacy. In the weeks where a small polish quietly balloons into something slower and bigger. On the days when my brain is pure fog and I get nowhere at all. It’s still me. It’s still Simone.