Saturday, March 12, 2011

The downward Spiral


I develop a lot of applications and software in my day to day work. One of the most important aspect that determines the "quality" of the application being developed is to stress test it. Stress testing can be of many forms. How good is the system responding at various loads. What is the upper bound of load the system could withstand? What would be the number of simultaneous requests it could take and could still serve its purpose? What resources usage it would require to accommodate the standards that has to be met?
Well the answer to all these always are specific. I found this so much related to life or was this imbibed a lot from life?
Life would be perfect if you go through your happy day scenario. You have born with a silver spoon, good parents, good education, good life, good spouse, good children, good everything. This in most of the cases will not happen. We need to prepare ourselves for "other" cases as well. What if this goes wrong, what if that goes wrong, how do I react to it. Beauty is, people tend to learn a lot from every experience and maturity levels keep getting better when you face the worse often. But at times, when the stress/pressure is too much, there is great possibility that the system will crash. This phase is called the "DOWNWARD SPIRAL".
Things suck during this time. Nothing will go right, even if remotely something does, brain tells that its not right. The self demotivation will be at its peak. Anything that is supposed to be helpful will result in tragedy. It would be insanely painful to withstand this period. There would be lot of easy escape routes tempting to be taken. It wont matter how talented you are, you could still be a victim. This is the most darkest and the dangerous zone a person can be put into.

Braga