Although I do not know Robert or his family, I have admired his professional work for a long time. I had also been reading with interest his 'Fatherhood' blog entries about his wifes pregnancy. These caught my attention because my own wife was at a similar stage of pregnancy as his, carrying our first child too. You could say I felt a sort of affinity with what he was experiencing, even if from afar.

To then read about what happened was a real shock. A sad and emotional shock that genuinely bought a tear to my eye. Only a few hours previous I had been sat cuddling my 11 day old nephew, thinking about how things are going to change so dramatically in a couple of months when my wife is due, and I guess all of these emotions compounded the feelings I had when I read about the news.

It also made me realise I spend too long infront of a computer, doing one thing or another. More often than not with my head burried deep into some code. I know for sure I am not alone here, a number of people I've worked with over the years are just the same - coding into the small hours of the morning, grabbing a few hours sleep (if at all) and then repeating the process. Crunch times, especially for my friends in the games industry, can be insane with 18 hour days and sleeping bags on the office floor in the final months of build, 7 days a week. And this is 'expected' behaviour, made so powerfully prominent by the 'EA spouse' thread from a few years back. Now while I'm lucky enough not to have to work in that kind of situation, I do still seem to self-inflict it! Are you the same? because I'm sure I am not the only one rowing this boat of mild work-driven insanity. There is something about the IT industry as a whole that forces us to be driven to be ever competitive, to keep on working, keep on coding, turning around projects as fast as we possibly can, as if that is some kind of 'ability' measurement.

I also believe that client expectations are increasing, and not in proportion with the speed at which we can deploy sites in PHP. Every new build of PHP gives us more power. Every new Pear package helps shave off a few development time slices. Yet all of the savings made from these areas are counter-balanced by the expectations in the first instance. Perhaps that is why the Ruby/Rails crowd feel so happy at the moment? because the framework should (technically) allow them to ride the crest of this expectation wave, rather than struggling to keep their heads above water.

As news on the Zend Framework gathers pace I can only hope that, given time, this will be a similar saviour for PHP developers worldwide. Yet I know full-well that when the first alpha release hits the public domain, people are going to rip it apart like a bunch of rabid dogs, criticising the flaws that will naturally exist, bemoaning how it doesn't do X, Y and Z, and claiming that "this is no better than ..." (insert other framework / language here).

It will just happen, it always does. No-one appears to ever be happy or content with anything, least of all anything to do with computing. You could argue that this breeds innovation, that feedback generates bug fixes and enhancements. This is only true if the feedback is of any sort of quality. Well structured, well formed, with the wider picture in mind. If only this was the norm rather than the exception.

And yet at the back of my mind, behind all of this, is the feeling that there are more important things in life. This is your one life, your only chance to have any kind of impact on this small blue dot of a planet. Balance your work and your family as best you can, because they are the only family you have, and they are precious.