{"id":588,"date":"2011-01-23T00:28:24","date_gmt":"2011-01-23T06:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/?p=588"},"modified":"2011-01-23T00:28:24","modified_gmt":"2011-01-23T06:28:24","slug":"sense-of-accomplishment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/archives\/588","title":{"rendered":"Sense of accomplishment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a difficult relationship with the concept of &#8216;a sense of accomplishment&#8217;. I feel like it&#8217;s somewhat necessary to true motivation, but then I feel it&#8217;s a character flaw to truly feel such a sense. I feel like I&#8217;ve done a lot of good work, but there&#8217;s always more I could have done. I feel like the things I&#8217;ve done are significant, but if I pointed them out to the average person, they&#8217;d be far less than impressed.<\/p>\n<p>One of my clients reached a big <a href=\"http:\/\/www.webfilings.com\/about\/news\/webfilings-rolls-out-q1-2011-release-its-end-end-sec-reporting-solution\">product milestone<\/a> recently. It&#8217;s pretty amazing that I&#8217;ve been with this product since its inception until this milestone. I felt the need to reflect on what I&#8217;ve worked on in the product in that time.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>code generation for AS3 to Python RPC<\/li>\n<li>HTML and RTF paste<\/li>\n<li>spell checking<\/li>\n<li>highlights and callouts<\/li>\n<li>XBRL HTML slicing<\/li>\n<li>equation parsing and evaluation<\/li>\n<li>slimming Flex module download size<\/li>\n<li>HTML import<\/li>\n<li>browser issues with keys and mousewheel<\/li>\n<li>Google AppEngine\/EC2 integration<\/li>\n<li>parallelization of translation functions<\/li>\n<li>Undisclosed Big-Deal Project<\/li>\n<li>PDF export<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When I look at each of those bullets, I remember lots of work that I had to do on each, the difficult problems that arose and the solutions to them, the necessity of each function and the contribution toward the overall product. But I also remember the things left undone that could make each function more perfect, the work that others did that I can&#8217;t take credit for, that if I pointed out these functions in the app, someone unfamiliar with the job wouldn&#8217;t understand the work that it represents, and that in at least one of these projects, all of my code is now dead.<\/p>\n<p>So my sense of accomplishment is a complicated and fragile thing. That&#8217;s not a problem; actually, when I say it, I feel like that&#8217;s a more mature attitude than one that&#8217;s more monolithic. Maybe that&#8217;s a partial solution to the question I mentioned above of whether it&#8217;s a character flaw to feel a sense of accomplishment: maybe it&#8217;s only hubris to feel good about the foreground of one&#8217;s accomplishments if one doesn&#8217;t also understand the inseparable background against which they are viewed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a difficult relationship with the concept of &#8216;a sense of accomplishment&#8217;. I feel like it&#8217;s somewhat necessary to true motivation, but then I feel it&#8217;s a character flaw to truly feel such a sense. I feel like I&#8217;ve done a lot of good work, but there&#8217;s always more I could have done. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","author-admin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}