You know the feeling.
You've been building a site for a while. Doing the authorization and permissions (which is peculiar and demanding to this particular project), you have battled for ages over the design, and not just the site, but the functionality and the database design and the way the scope of the models/controllers/libraries/third party stuff and how it will all tie together. You start building and every step is a massive convergence of demands that have not been written yet, complications unforeseen and user implications that need working around. Testing ideas, trying out new concepts and dealing with the headaches of rewriting and re-planning the unexpected and unrealized flaws.
And finally,
There is still a long, long way to go, but you have reached a point where it all jumps into life. Where the long road ahead is suddenly downhill, not uphill. Where clicking around the test site suddenly starts to make sense, functionality suddenly comes to life, and all the hard work starts to pay off in an ever increasing speed of development. The finish line may be a long way away, but there it is in the distance, clearly visible with hardly any obstacles left on the path.
I am just there again tonight and I love this feeling.
And during the whole journey, CI has quietly been there, churning over in the background, doing everything you need flawlessly and without complaint. I may have driven her (and to me CI is a female) in a direction I chose, to reach a goal CI will never have any idea about, faced obstacles CI will never care about, but without her the journey would have been so much longer, so much harder and so much less enjoyable.
I love CI. Like I love my car and my guitar. (And quite possibly this bottle of wine I am just finishing.)
Thank you CI.
Paul.
