The doors, door-frames and woodwork in our house have definitely seen better days--not exactly surprising for a place that housed a family of five in the 70s, 80s, and maybe even into the 90s. (In fairness, the floors were polished/varnished to almost a mirror finish before the house went on the market.) Naively, I decided to paint the afore-mentioned doors, frames and trim in white. Which I wouldn't have done if I'd known that it would take four coats of "single-coat application" paint to look decent.
While the first coat of white-on-dark-brown definitely looks the worst, at least it's a no-brainer. The fourth coat definitely is the worst--at least from an execution standpoint. Not only do you need to make sure that everything looks smooth and blended, it's also most difficult to do because it's now white-on-mostly-white. Which is not particularly fun, even when you're notworking out of direct sunlight behind the furniture and drapes piled up in the middle of the room.
(Yeah--First World Problems, I get it...)
That's the point when--if you're a geek with a penchant for cheesy similes, anyway--you realise that there's a resemblance between this situation and the penultimate stages of a large-ish software project. You feel like you've been at this for ages with no measurable progress. You find yourself correcting flaws on this iteration when you can't imagine how you missed them earlier. You're cursing design decisions insouciantly made months ago. You're cursing yourself, because you were the one who made them.
That's where milestones come in. But sometimes, even milestones are too far apart. Particularly when you're on a ladder and your arm-reach is somewhere on the order of a T-Rex's. And, anyways, you live under the metric system now, darnitalready: Fire up that calculator and multiply by zero-point-six-two: Voila--kilometrestones!
Often, the little bumps, irregularities and outright freaks in the material are enough to tell you where you are...and where the next stop is. Typically, that's all that's needed. After all, you're effectively breaking down a large job into smaller tasks.
But every once in awhile, you hit a smooth patch and there are no natural kilometrestones. Well, you haven't painted the actual wall bits yet. So just swipe a bit of paint on the drywall and shoot for that.
Which is not unlike a point in my first "real" programming job when we'd been scrambling to push Version 1.0 out the door. On a shoestring. During the post-9/11-post-dot-com recession. For no appreciable reason other than "we needed to celebrate," the office boss threw a breakroom party. Knowing him and his sugar-daddy streak, it was probably on his own dime, rather than the office's.
Because, ultimately, any job worth doing (whether it's software development or making a house more livable) isn't a contrived story problem in Physics or Calculus 101. In the real world, momentum trumps velocity.
