Programming Anxiety

Although I don't do much hardcore programming at my job anymore, sometimes I take on a small project just to keep myself sharp as well as avoiding the need to outsource an easy project.

Nearly five months ago, we put an online registration live to support a free conference downtown. Because it was free and didn't require a login to join, there were a few problems along the way with somebody using a bot to register bogus entries through a transparent proxy. But, for the most part, the site held true and no real problems surfaced.

With the conference starting this week, I woke up 2 a.m. on Sunday morning with a substantial fear (possibly from a nightmare) that I had captured the data wrong and that nearly 1,500 people were all going to wrong breakout sessions because of my coding errors. I kept myself awake for probably 45 minutes debating if this was possible (of course it was possible) and if I was dumb enough to make this error (of course I'm dumb enough).

But, as of this afternoon, there hasn't been any panicked calls about participant riots at the conference, so I'm fairly comfortable either my data collection has been accurate or folks are too stupid to know they are in the wrong breakout session.

Seriously, I have had some awful jobs and job situations over the years, and I can probably count on one hand the number of times the workplace has kept me awake. I'm usually very good at calming (or suppressing) my daily life to get a reasonable amount of sleep, but this one site...probably the least stressful aspect of my job over the past few months...really got to me. Weird.