It is becoming a sport for me to see how many days I can do useful work – things that I do actually need to do, and now rather than in a month’s time – without writing any actual code. Today I resolved a few customer support issues, brought some of our stats and metrics files up to date, and looked through unprocessed bug reports in our backlog. The number of open bug reports that we hope to fix at some point (as opposed to those we close because fixing them would be too much work for too little benefit) has increased by 16% while I was away. That doesn’t surprise me at all. The number always goes up, as soon as we stop focusing on it. Now that we have a chart to look at again, hopefully we can get it back down again.