Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Walgreens, Blockbuster and Greyhound. Oh my!

Work has been crazy lately. I love my job, but sometimes I really wish I could be my own boss and have more control over my time and income. Lately we have been closing some big deals. In the US: Walgreens, Cumberland Farms, Blockbuster, Greyhound; and in the UK: WHSith, Somerfield, Clinton Cards, PayPoint. Each one of these requires a lot of time and effort for me and a lot of other people at the company. All of these projects combined could add up to a total of over 15,000 new locations for us. We only have 6,000 right now. Since I am now the Lead Software Engineer in our group here in SLC, I feel more responsibility than ever to make sure our system doesn't crash or get overloaded and tank. I find myself going to sleep at night thinking about whether there is anything I have forgotten about that might cause a transaction to fail or whether a small bug might cause a very important customer to get upset. I know that being more organized would take away a lot of the stress, but that is another story. Even if I did have better organization, I know I would still wake my wife up in the middle of the night talking in my sleep about transactions and databases and program designs. Don't get me wrong, I really do love my job. I've had it since I was 16 and I love how much I have grown and learned because of it. It's just that sometimes I feel like I could be doing more with my career. I think I just want to be solving bigger problems than invoice formatting, or shaving off a few milliseconds from the round trip time of a transaction. Things like solving the world's energy problem, making higher education available for everyone, or finding a unified field theory for the world of physics are the big three that always come to mind.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

sean...have you been reading about solar energy lately? hmmm...p.s. this is haley again

mom said...

Chohnny Poy, I love your blog! I knew alot of those things about you, but also learned a ton! What a wonderful person you are. Aimee and you are delightful people with a beautiful boy! I love you, mom