It's amazing what you can pull off when you find yourself enjoying something that your good at. In spite of a full night of deploying code and generally rectifying sick servers I managed to get another server ready for installation and to troubleshoot various system issues today. At one point the boss asked me if I "ever sleep" Why yes, but it's highly overrated. Actually I do sleep, quite well in fact. So where do I make up the extra time? Pace.

I found out long ago, before my obsession with endurance racing, that pace is everything. There is a delicate balance to be struck between outright speed and survivability. The key is in known how hard you can work while maintaining both quality of work and skirting total exhaustion. It may seem counter intuitive but by adopting a slower pace you can actually produce more than by pressing hard for a period and then taking time to recover. Obviously you have to maintain a minimum pace for this theory to work and therein lies the challenge: How slow can you work yet still achieve the same amount of work.

Workaholics will counter that by throttling back you are being lazy and "just trying to get by". It may seem this way but take it from someone who has worked with those who do things in fits and starts, mistakes happen when you overextend yourself. Mistakes often lead to rework or correction which compromises the overall productivity of any activity. The net sum may not always equal greater productivity when pacing projects but on balance you'll find mistakes have greater consequence than simple rework.

Besides less fatigue leads to happier workers, something that is important in creative centric operations. On any level sustainability is as much about achieving objectives is as it is about keeping key elements happy. Endless drives toward moving targets and relentless scheduling can reduce even the brightest minds to mere robots of "getting things done". It isn't healthy and it isn't sustainable.

It's been nearly three months since I starting the new gig and in that time so much has changed that I dare cite all of the differences. Of course that's not entirely a bad thing since most of the changes involve more responsibility and greater flexibility in doing my job. At the end of the day I'm still writing code and working with a team of developer and support folks, two things that I desired most.

The challenges of the job are not unlike the challenges before, though they manifest in a different way. For example my current company is much further along in its life cycle and as a result is faced more with customer retention and satisfaction than simply wooing new customers. Of course like many small businesses there are key contracts and large customers that take priority and tend to jump to the head of the line when problems arise.

Another challenge that I face daily is the support of a legacy system, which is built on technology that while not quite at its end-of-life has certainly been usurped by a better alternative. There are also challenges related to scalability since the prior generation never anticipated the current level of demand and as such the strategy is to rewrite much of the code. The unfortunate downside is that the existing code must be maintained until the replacement is ready. As I've seen in the past these sorts of things tend to take longer than expected a fact, which must be endured for the sake of the current customers.

All in all I would say that I, and the company, are in a good position despite the challenges. The important take away from all of this is that while there may be a dramatic shift between the initial job description and what you find yourself doing in three months, the outcome is certainly for the better. Chances are if you are the right person for the job you will still find yourself at least partially within your comfort zone and at the very least pressed to expand your talents and knowledge.

Even though I think the Web 2.0 thing is running out of steam I've joined a few more circles all in the interest of shameless self-promotion. At one time I was a member of Twitter. I deleted my account because I never posted anything but today I'm back and plan to take whatever advantage can be had from the site. I've also joined up at pownce, which is very much like twitter only without the horrendous interface design. Check them both out but don't expect anything exclusive over there.

So you may be wondering why I've bothered to rejoin the ranks of social Web 2.0 if I think the thing is on the down slide? Historically sites like Twitter and Pownce have generated a huge amount of traffic for my sites and more importantly they boost your reputation with the search engines. Sure, I know that rel="nofollow" pretty much tells Google to ignore the link, but there are hundreds of other search engines out there that don't ignore those links. When you lead second tier robots to your site your not only gaining exposure to search engines, but inevitably you'll find your site included in directories and other filtered information sites which largely rely upon automated harvesting methods to bring in new data.

Besides what do you have to lose? As long as the social web is free you might as well take advantage and pump up the old "brand" as much as possible. Maybe it seems a bit self serving and narcissistic but after all isn't that what blogging is all about?