Despite of the general mental mood and how my day had started, I am thankful that by the grace of God, I was able to set the tone for how I wanted my day to go. For the last couple of years, I have been training myself to not let how my day started to have a final say in how I wanted my day to end. I believe that is part of learning how to build up our own resilience/grit. It’s that daily reminder that no matter how our day starts, we always have a choice on how our day will end. Sure, there will always be things we can’t control. I don’t know how those situations will turn out. I try to be cautiously optimistic when I can be, but I also know that dwelling on the “what-ifs”, and “hopefull-ies” won’t make them anymore real and concrete.

So I’ve learned to focus instead on the things that I can control in that situation. Right now, the one thing I can control is my freelance project. Yes, I am grateful that my freelance client has approved that final payment to me. I’m thinking that if it’s processed yesterday, I should be able to receive that S$100 by today (I did receive an advance a few weeks ago, and I’ve been candid about it). For now, between this week and the 15th July, I’ll be focusing all of my attention and energy (unless a new project comes a long) on ensuring that the final integration goes as smooth as humanly possible. That means being extremely meticulous and anal about my testing and improvements. It also means ensuring that the documentation is world-class. The Satori PageBuilder that I’ve built may only be a version 1.0 release, but I want to make every single detail about this release so good that whomever decides to dig into it, it will feel like it’s a version 5.0 release. I want them to feel like I have been doing this for some time. That’s my standard. And it is what I will always strive towards, regardless of who the client may be.

So, before I went for an early lunch (to beat the lunch crowd), I had already began discovering some issues and fixing/improving them. So I’d say that I’m off to a good start today. For the rest of my afternoon, I will go over every view, click on every single button, every drop down list, and test it all one by one. It might seem slow, but trust me, it’s better than being fast and missing something.

This reminded me of a time while I was still on-the-job. This was around 2012~2013. There was this web project. A full website where I was the senior web developer, so I was kinda taking the lead on the development at that time (small agency). So, when it came time for testing, I was deeply thorough. In fact, during the development stage, I was already putting a lot of thought into how I wanted to build and code the website’s features and functionality. Everything felt intentional and done with purpose. By the time the website was delivered to the end user of UAT (User Acceptance Testing), they couldn’t find any errors or bugs. This is a true story. And one I am still proud of telling from time-to-time.

That experience, and a few others throughout my career has been a reminder that when we take the greatest care in what we build, how we build it, and how we test what we’ve built, we can make it…well [almost] perfect. And so that is precisely what I’m going to do here as well.