So, you wanna hear about the “Miguel Race,” huh? It wasn’t a race with cars or anything, not really. It was more like a sprint, a mad dash, a project that old Miguel, bless his cotton socks, kind of dropped on us like a hot potato. We all just started calling it the “Miguel Race” because, well, it felt like one, and Miguel was the guy tapping his foot at the finish line, or so it seemed.
I got pulled in, like always, when things were already a bit pear-shaped. First thing I did, I tried to get a handle on what was actually needed. Scrambled through the docs, or what passed for docs. Then I started sketching out a plan. Just basic stuff, you know? What pieces we needed, who could do what. I remembered thinking, “This is gonna be tight.”
The Grind
And tight it was. We worked late nights, man. Coffee became my best friend. My diet? Terrible. Pizza, more coffee, repeat. We coded like there was no tomorrow. We debugged. Oh, the debugging. That was a special kind of hell. You fix one thing, two more pop up. Classic. We held quick stand-ups, mostly just to see who was still standing. We pushed code, merged branches, sometimes with our eyes half-closed.
- Building out the front-end felt like wrestling an octopus.
- Connecting the backend was like trying to thread a needle in the dark.
- And Miguel? He’d pop in, ask “how’s it going?” with that smile, and we’d all just nod. What else could we do?
We cobbled together different bits of old code, tried to make them talk to new stuff. It was a mess, honestly. I spent a whole weekend just trying to get one particular module to behave. My screen looked like a Christmas tree with all the error messages flashing.
Did we finish? Yeah, we did. Somehow. Dragged it over the finish line, kicking and screaming. It wasn’t pretty, not by a long shot. Lots of duct tape and prayers holding it together. Miguel was happy, or at least he said he was. Got his project. We just felt… empty. Like we’d run a marathon and got a lukewarm glass of water at the end.
What I Really Think About It Now
You know, that whole “Miguel Race” thing really got me thinking. Not just about that project, but about the whole way we were working back then. It was all just go, go, go. Burnout city, population: us. I remember after that, I actually took a week off. Just totally unplugged. Went camping. No screens, no deadlines. Just trees and a campfire. My wife, she’d been telling me for ages I needed a break. Said I was turning into a grump. She was right, of course.
That camping trip, it sounds cheesy, but it changed things for me. I came back and I started saying “no” a bit more. Or at least, “let’s talk about the deadline” a bit more. It’s funny, because a few months after the “Miguel Race,” Miguel himself moved on to another company. Heard he was chasing some big promotion. Good for him, I guess. But it left us to pick up the pieces of his “race,” to actually make the thing stable. That took even longer than the race itself. We had to refactor so much of that rushed code. It was like paying off a huge debt.
So yeah, the “Miguel Race.” We “won,” but what did we really win? A bit more stress, a few more grey hairs. Now, when I see a project turning into another “race,” I speak up. Not always easy, but hey, I like camping more than I like coding at 3 AM fueled by stale pizza. It’s a simple choice, really. You just gotta make it.
