Limits

**NOTICE**: Non EVE Related Post, regular EVE and gaming posts to resume tomorrow.

I found my limits this past 5 months.

For the past couple years I was scrum master / team lead / senior developer of my team at work which I enjoyed and am good at. But changes in personnel over the past year have seen a few senior developers leave the team and suddenly at the beginning of this year I found myself having to take on a large architectural role for my team and in development overall.

At first this was not a big commitment but over time the increased responsibilities began to wear on me, not only externally dealing with the big picture broad strokes of architecture, but increased development lead internally on the team. Coupled with my current duties of scrum master (really, I prefer Scrumlord) I found my development time decreasing, my free time evaporating, and my stress levels and interruptions increasing. Add on to that the constant pressure of family and home and all the related responsibilities therein implied.

I started to hit my limits on how many balls I could keep in the air, and as a result some balls started to drop and my patience and reserves along with them.

It has been years since I felt that level of constant stress and frustration, not since the twins were newborn and sleep was at a premium, and even then it was mostly exhaustion. This time was real pure stress over a sustained period of time that I have never experienced. Spikes of stress in school were more intense but short lived, a couple of days at most. This was weeks upon weeks of unending things to do and people to help or take care of.

When I finally blew up at my boss while I was trying to fix a broken build and he wanted to ask an unrelated question, I knew I had hit my limits. I had warned my boss previously that I was getting close to that point earlier so we both knew that the yelling was the culmination of the issue. Something had to give.

Last week I talked it over with my boss and I decided reluctantly to turn over scrum master to a co-worker on the team and I will focus on my newer architectural duties, the hope being that with fewer things to distract day to day I can achieve a better balance. So far this sprint I have felt much better and less stressed, we'll see if it keeps up.

What all this means for you, dear reader, is that I hope that I can find some free down time to be able to blog more regularly, and for my corp mates to see me back leading fleets again as the past couple weeks have seen me rather absent.