How to Breathe

The two hardest lessons of my professional life did not come from code. They came from people, and both taught me the same thing.

The first involved a VR bug fix and a localization pass. I made the changes and tested them on the brand-new hardware I had been handed, where everything worked perfectly. The reply kept coming back that it was broken. It turned out they had never actually loaded the fixed build, so they were never running the thing they said did not work. Never a moment of "maybe it is us," never a glance at my very detailed, step-by-step guide, never a test of the fix itself. And despite a famously tight budget, once it magically started working, we moved on as if none of it had happened, straight into the next round of changes, and the next. I am genuinely relieved that chapter is closed.

The second was an onsite test described to me like a five-alarm emergency, weeks overdue. Getting there meant a couple of hours on public transit, switching between lines. When I arrived, the hardware was not set up. There was, as it turned out, no hardware at all. So I made the same multi-transfer trip home, out the time and the fare, having accomplished a solid nothing.

Staying professional, for me, is not actually being calm. It is more like Bruce Banner admitting his secret is that he is always angry. It is the small daily discipline of not saying the first thing that comes to mind. And when neither the fix nor the venting will change anything, the most valuable skill I have picked up in this career is simply to breeeeeeeeeeathe.