The frustration of not being able to take technical ideas forward…it’s never been about the money…and it’s no different to crafting a cool hand-made watch

There is huge pressure on getting deployments out to production.  I have been using the Pomodoro technique to focus on one thing at a time for a twenty five minute block.  This works until you have five people stood by your desk.

I’m sure someone famous suggested that evolution is better than revolution, but I have felt the subtle shift from pro-active to re-active in my working habits in the last couple of weeks.  I guess this is normal, but I still have a frustration when the content management system (CMS) manager is querying the results on the search page for the website….

The questions basically went “Why are we having broken links for our search results?”

The reason is simple.  We are crawling the results on our website which is not taking into account the publishing (removal and addition) of pages which are being pushed from CQ into production.  I so want to resolve this issue.  Write some software which “pretends” to be a CQ replication agent - but in effect parses a request for content addition or (more importantly deletion) and talks to the Google search indexes (why we are not using SOLR is another discussion).

I am going to put some time aside to take a look at the CQ replication payload, and see what is involved in parsing it.  It would be even cooler if we can set up a workflow stage which will talk to the Google search index.  Happy days.

Juggling this is going to be difficult especially as the development schedule is full.  But, if I didn’t do this I wouldn’t be true to myself - which is what the technology passion is all about.

Because it was never about the money, it’s all about pitching a great idea, fixing a problem, being Jo Cool who debugs and fixes things, automating manual stuff, and plugging in the Senheiser headphones and cranking up the volume.

The old CTO made a good analogy.  It’s no different to designing or crafting something.  The best people put their heart and soul into it.  I applaud this idea, but do one thing for me - make sure you take time out from this all consuming passion, and make sure that people don’t use you.  This should not be viewed as a negative statement - but rather a pragmatic one :O)