Alright, so we did it. We pushed past the ‘supra et ultra’ point, got the whole damn thing shipped. Everyone was patting themselves on the back. High fives all around, you know the drill.
But then what? That’s the real kicker, isn’t it? The mission after the big push. Turns out, it wasn’t champagne and holidays. Not right away, at least.
The Morning After the ‘Supra et Ultra’
First thing I did? Slept. Like, for a whole day. Woke up feeling like I’d been run over by a truck. The adrenaline was gone. Just… quiet. Too quiet.
Then came the slow crawl back to reality. You look at the thing you built, the thing you bled for. And yeah, it’s working. Mostly. But you start seeing all the cracks you papered over. All the shortcuts you took because ‘supra et ultra’ meant hitting that deadline, no matter what.
So, the real mission started. Cleanup. That was the name of the game. Going back through lines and lines of code, documentation, configs. Stuff we hacked together in a caffeine-fueled haze.
- Fixing bugs that were ‘features’ last week.
- Refactoring code that made your eyes water.
- Writing the docs we skipped because ‘who needs docs when it works?’. Famous last words.
- Apologizing to the support team. A lot.
Reality Bites Back
It wasn’t glorious. It wasn’t ‘ultra’. It was just… work. Necessary work. The kind nobody celebrates but everyone relies on.
You realize that ‘supra et ultra’ is just one peak. A big one, sure. But mountains always have another side, usually a long, slow slope down into the next valley where you gotta fix the gear you broke getting to the top.
We spent weeks, maybe months, just stabilizing. Paying back the technical debt we racked up. Some people burned out. Left. Can’t blame them. That kind of push takes a toll. You think you’re a hero crossing the finish line, but sometimes you’re just the first one to collapse.
My big takeaway? ‘Supra et ultra’ sounds cool. Feels important in the moment. But the real test? It’s the ‘after’. It’s showing up the next day, and the day after that, to sweep the floors and patch the holes. That’s the part that keeps things running. That’s the mission that never really ends.
So yeah. We did the impossible. Then we did the mundane. Guess that’s just how it goes. Still here, though. Still patching.
