The files are checked into the source code control system, the build/config document is finished (I hope) and the handoff meeting is scheduled for tomorrow.  The code that I’ve been working on for the past nine or ten months is being transferred to a more-dedicated developer to finish up the last few odd and ends (finish implementing a couple of ‘nice to have’ methods and packaging it for a production deployment).  It’s kind of sad, though, because this will probably be the last bit of code that I get to write ‘officially’ on a project.  But it’s not unexpected, because my job has changed to the point that it’s impractical for me to write any significant amount of code.  My schedule is no longer my own, it seems, and I spend all day talking to other people about requirements and code, rather than actually getting anything done. 

For example, this is what the current week looks like:

Every one of those little boxes represents time spent talking to somebody about something unrelated to the project I’m handing off tomorrow (yes, technically I’m writing this from inside one of those boxes; in this case I got lucky and one of the key players never showed up, freeing up part of an hour, which I just used to check in the last of my files before starting this entry).  Without all those meetings I could probably have done the code in a third (or less) of the time it actually took.

From now on, any coding that I do will be for personal projects and it’ll all have to be after hours (which doesn’t preclude doing stuff for work; it just means that it can’t be on anyone’s official schedule or anything).