code freeze.

"Where did November go?" a voices cries out over the cubicle walls. It wasn't my voice, but I lamented along with it. I wanted part of November back. No one would mind another Thanksgiving. Let's go back and celebrate our veterans again! Why can't it be more like 60 days hath November?

My company operates on an annual release cycle, that is, we release a new version of our product every year. We shoot for sometime around March. And so we put out a beta version during January and February, which means we should probably finish up the coding...well, really soon. In fact, the official date that we're told to stop writing new code is December 31st. Would you like to learn a new, hip computer science term?

code freeze (n): The time when programmers stop adding new code. The existing code may be tested for bugs, which can be fixed (and probably should be), but no new features are implemented, no functionality is added.

Code freeze happens for us on December 31st. It's not a friendly deadline, because working overtime to meet your deadline means working during the holidays. I suppose I could be bitter about that, if I weren't so stressed.

I'm not exactly stressed out. I've just got a nagging stress, the kind you got in high school when you were assigned a paper and every day you procrastinated there was this tiny feeling of mild unhappiness in the back of your mind which soured your every second only minutely. I've had this feeling since September.

My only relief is that everyone else seems to be suffering, too. I don't mean that I find joy in the discomfort of others. It's just that I'm new here, and so I don't know how much I'm realistically supposed to get done. But if everyone else, even the folks who have been with the company for 15+ years, are lagging behind, then it gives me hope that at least I'm not the lone gimpy sled dog.

Still, that doesn't really make the stress go away. It only calms me when I'm in danger of hyperventilating that I'm not going to make my deadlines, I'm incompetent, I will start out the new year by looking for another job. I'll just take a deep breath and write code for ten hours straight if I have to. Code freeze will come, but it will happen after I get my features in.

Still. Where did November go?