I just realized that I’ve been “offline” for a while. “Offline” in the sense that this blog hasn’t had any updates for almost 2 weeks now. There are a couple of reasons for it. Probably the chief reason is that I’ve been very under-the-weather lately. Then, there are also critical project milestones to meet at work. The two combined together have left me no time and no “mood” to blog anything.

It’s the first time that I’m getting such an acute sinusitis. It was so bad that the pain I had felt, wasn’t headache, but literally pain in the sinuses. It was as bad as, or perhaps worse, than the intensity of my typically headaches.

The illness caused my productivity to go down. I haven’t been actively doing any programming for a while, but it just so happened that I needed to do some intense programming this last few weeks. What made it even worse is that it was someone else’s code that I was trying to fix/enhance. If you are a programmer, you’ll understand it isn’t so difficult to fix your own code as it is to fix someone else’s.

Then, I decided that I needed to do major “code surgery”. This required plenty of brain juices to formulate the surgery plan, to visualize the process and the end-result. But my illness meant that I couldn’t think very productively. I sat at my computer, wondering how come the thinking process wasn’t happening. Usually, I can visualize how code flows, how various components would interact with each other, etc. It wasn’t happening quite the same way this time.

Eventually, what had to be done, was done. Painfully slowly. I couldn’t recall a time when programming was so unproductive.