I have figured one of the keys to my own happiness.

It’s about being an artisan.

You need to sit down every day, and do the work.

You need to be a craftsman, to dig deep to find root causes.

You need to not surrender to your partners’ urgency. The best way to deal with urgent problems, is to dedicate time for them, and handle them with care and thought.

The database is down and the critical service doesn’t work anymore ™️⌗

I want to illustrate my thought by an example.

I got a message telling me that the database is down.

Another one, that the other critical service that is a pain to fix every time (it’s scraping-related, so the other side is actually working to boot us out of their systems).

One answer would’ve been to panic, to assign blame, to cry, to tell everyone that everything is broken.

The other is to work on the problems.

I fixed the database. It was painful, but in the end, it only took me a few hours.

I fixed the scraping service. It was painful, but this too, only took me a few hours.

I have fixed this critical situation in about 10 hours of my time. What I needed was to put my attention on what’s in front of me: the database is down; I will not stop until it’s fixed. The generation service is broken; I will try to improve it fundamentally, instead of trying cheap hacks to get production fixed fast.

Most of the time, the “long” fixes are actually the shortest fixes.

I feel like I’m making breakthrough these days… And they’re all surprisingly simple.

It comes down to: pick one good work item, and work hard on it. Pick a few priorities, and be unstoppable about them.