Holiday Weekend Work and the Independent Developer

It seems I’ve often found myself in the position where a project I was working on required a concentrated effort on my part during a holiday weekend, and this Memorial Day weekend is no exception for me. 

A long weekend is actually a time when I really do prefer to work with application upgrades for my clients.  For one thing, it offers the longest time window that I have to work with live data to do table field additions, table changes or add/change indexing.  I’m fortunate in that only one of my clients requries 24×7 use of their database.

However, if I’m going to be doing such work over a holiday weekend, I want to make the time invested really matter.  Detailed planning and testing ahead of time really helps accomplish the tasks required in an efficient manner.  This tends to be an area where I use my “virtual” network extensively — develop on one machine, test from others.

If I’m going to be doing development work over a holiday weekend I really don’t want it to be just like any other day — in other words I’m looking for my holiday weekend work to be stress-free, who needs hassle on a weekend?  Certainly not me!  That’s why more than any other time I come into the work really knowing what to expect (besides the un-expected).  “Plan your work, then work your plan” is always a good method — but for me, prior to my holiday weekend work it’s a must!