I spent today at work writing up the next draft of our software architecture document. Now, I don't think I'm a terrible writer, but I'm not quick. It took me four hours to write the last 3-4 pages. It's a technical document so it has a lot of information for the amount of space used. Still, it was quite an arduous task.

I actually started last night and spent five hours rewriting a few pages. Last Friday I said that I'd have this document done by Monday morning. Pick, my manager, said I didn't have to get it done until Monday night. That was a bit of a mistake, maybe.

By rights, I'd have stayed up all night writing it up. Then been totally useless Monday since I'd be too tired to do anything. But I'd still go to work and attend the Monday meeting. Then I'd sleep a bit but try to leave at 15:00 or so to drive home and sleep.

The drive home would be quite an adventure. Almost impossible for me to stay up, constantly dropping off for a second or two. Suddenly waking up as my car is about to cross the lane. Trying desperately to stay awake. Singing, slapping myself, pouring water on myself. Then I'd drop off again for a second. I'd be lucky to get through the hour drive in one piece.

I can imagine it well because I've done it before. And it's not something I'd want to do again. But, if Pick wants something done by this date, Goddess help me but I'll get it done by that date. Unfortunately, as I did in school, I'll procrastinate a bit so that I have to pull a couple of long nights to finish on time.

Part of the reason is that Pick is a friend, and was a friend before he was my boss. And I hate letting a friend down. But another part of it is that he's a natural leader. He takes care of his people, works harder than any of us, and leads by example. It's hard not to do your best when the boss puts in 10 hour days.

So once again I'm writing our definitive document that explains our architecture, database schema, how we get data, what we do with it, etc. Everything I can think up. Naturally, there's been a lot of input from the other team members. We had meetings where I explained my ideas, heard their ideas, then we decided to go with my ideas. Most of the time.

I take stuff from other smaller documents that we've written. Then I write. Expand sections that are kind of vague. Back up statements with numbers of some kind. Spent a couple hours drawing a big diagram showing all our tables with the data flows in and out. Drawing pictures with Microsoft Word is a real pain. It's a slow program in the first place, it's slower in page view mode, you can't draw pictures in normal mode, and it constantly redraws the whole screen when I scroll around.

But anyway, I did get it done and mailed. Lots of little holes that we'll have to discuss tomorrow. Then another draft to fix those holes. And maybe fix some bugs from the previous release of our software.