Wandering Thoughts: Recent Entries For 2007/10/08

I have new system enthusiasm

I get it every so often: a new system that consumes my attention, my thoughts, and my interest. I find myself thinking about it all the time and then working on it all the time; it doesn't matter that I'm not at work, I want to work on it anyways so I do. And I'm impatient to see what I've built go into production, to actually get used, to give me feedback.

The current new system enthusiasm is for our new mail environment, which we have finally constructed and are now starting to deploy. Slowly. Conservatively. Bit by bit, which leaves me chomping at the bit to go faster (and deeper, with more changes to the old environment than I thought of initially).

Whenever this happens, I try to remember that what I am feeling is an irrational enthusiasm. However much I feel that the new mail system is ready for full deployment right now, it's not an entirely rational feeling. And thus, however much it makes me do an impatient dance, we should do a cautious staged deployment, and not accelerate the timetable (or change it) without good, solid reasons.

(I also have to remember that counting on my co-workers to restrain my enthusiasm is not necessarily wise. I know the most about the new system, so I may well be able to do a good enough sales job to talk them into something despite it being a bad idea, whether or not I realize it. After all, I am in a great position to talk about all of the benefits of the new system and enthusiastic enough to talk down the risks, because with my enthusiasm comes confidence.)

I'm still looking forward to tomorrow, when I get to throw the switch to make more of the new mail system live. (Right now all it is doing is handling final delivery of mail to /var/mail; tomorrow it starts actually routing some email.)