I had a big issue with the website of one of my customers as due to some bugs in the website code there were a lot of copies of the images in that website taking up quite a lot of disk space. And as I regularly download backups of everything I host in data centers this was, in combination with my internet problems, quite a problem for me.
As this was quite a large job and needed to be done with care it took me a while to start with it, but about one or two weeks ago I found time to start with it. But as the problem was a bit complicated I was not able to finish it in one working segment. So I planned another and another, not pushing myself too much as, again, it was a job to be done with care as a mistake might cost me a lot of time to solve. As one of the risks was that the photo’s would be gone, meaning I would have to upload them from a backup in the office to the hosting server. And that would take a lot of time, as for these type of things internet speed is pretty slow.
Anyhow, today I was kind of committed to finish this project, but it took me still quite some time to get all the bugs out of this small program to delete some stuff that was not needed anymore. Ah, and it was about thousands of photo’s, so not something you would do manually and also quite complicated to check.
So after finally running my last tests on my local system I decided to upload, do one test run (without making changes) and after that looked okay run the final program and solve the problem.
And I was amazed, as the test run was very fast, like a hundred or a thousand times faster than my test runs. It was like a few seconds. And the final run I expected to be slower as it involved quite some data,but no, that was also fast, like a few seconds.
And it really felt like an anticlimax. As I had spend hours, days to create this program. And it just ran for a few seconds and that was the end of it. And to be honest I felt disappointed. Somehow I still expected problems to be solved after running the program or still having problems with the data not properly converted or deleted.
But no, in a few seconds, imagine even over the internet, the program had done its job and the project was finished and the problem was solved. And I didn’t feel satisfied or proud or happy; no, actually I felt dissatisfied and disappointed. And I still feel like that.
So what weird mechanism is working here? I should(?!) feel satisfied and happy and proud as I had solved a major problem that had haunted me for months. And yes, looking back I know I spent the time and the effort to make the program do what it was supposed to do. So I have all reason to be satisfied. And apparently all my testing paid off, as the bugs came out while testing, not in the final run, as it should.
But I had expected some kind of ‘booooom’. Or at least the program running for a few minutes. And I think the last was the major thing, that the final run was just so fast. And then it was over. And the program is never to be ran again. And that’s what I spent hours and days on.
And I know somehow this is very common when achieving success by working for it. Like I often read that ‘success’, that winning in sports for example, is in the training, in the preparation. Not in the game itself, the game that is also often only hours or maybe even parts of an hour.
But still weird, this feeling I had today. And I also still don’t know what to learn from it,even though there are quotes in my mind like the journey is more important than the goal. And I also know from riding a bicycle climbing mountains in the end it’s about the climb, not about the going down. As also there the climb is hours and hours, and the going down is often less than an hour.
But seconds versus hours and days? That’s still weird.