Ski trip. Lake Tahoe. Excellent snow. Spectacular weather. A few good pictures, some sore muscles, marginally improved technique, and a lot of great memories...

When you're sailing the Seven Seas of framework design and OS development, islands of "relative calm" are few and far between, it seems. Sometimes you just have to take a little detour to the tropics to keep the crew's morale up. :-) (...though I seem to recall something about this ultimately backfiring for a certain Captain Bligh... hmmm...)

Chris posted some interesting comments a while back about framework development as it differs from app development, and I'm certainly finding ample opportunity to reflect further on the various aspects of the process while experiencing it firsthand... Doing it at the OS level really amplifies the consequences of every little design decision — which generally means that a lot of process and review and discussion and many-eyes-scrutinizing is necessary to have hope of getting an API right.

It can become exhausting and tedious to the point where one starts to lose sight of the interesting creative process of mental model-building that pulls the whole cart in the first place. But in the end the result is probably worth all the "sweating of small stuff", and even the frustrating propensity for things to occasionally get hung up on the most miniscule of issues... Although it often seems like there ought to be, I don't know that there's any significantly better process available to those of us working in software engineering... (If you happen to have one handy, by all means please forward it to me! — Thanks!! :-)