Out of Steam
I have the day off work tomorrow. I'm almost giddy with excitement. Ok, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. In all likelihood I'll be taking the kids down to Starbucks in the morning, and then to the park in town. We have a 'plus one' – our youngest has a friend over for a sleepover. At the moment they are looking forward to Starbucks, but I imagine feeding the ducks and swans will rapidly turn into the highlight of the morning.
I'm shattered. Even though it's still only Thursday night, this week really seems to have knocked the stuffing out of me. Endless coding stretches, massive complexity in the stuff I have been working on, and requests for my time flying in from all directions. And then of course I got home each day and had to deal with the usual round of craziness.
I had a count up of the lines of programming in the project I have been working on earlier today – the project that has seen my flying back and forth to Germany for the last year. We're now at roughly eighty thousand lines of code. It's quite sobering to think that I wrote it all, and that most of it seems to work.
I think perhaps the weirdest part about software development is that when issues happen you tend to develop a sixth sense – a knowledge not just of where the problem is happening in the code, but where it originated from. Often problems develop slowly – one thing behaves unexpectedly, which leads another to behave erratically, then another falls over entirely. The most difficult issues to solve are when multiple faiures disguise each other – I have a t-shirt somewhere with the various levels of debugging listed on it – starting with 'it works ok on my system', and ending with 'how did it ever work in the first place?'.
Anyway. Enough about that.
Time to switch off, watch a movie, read a book, and get away from the computer for a while. Maybe I'll read a few friend's blogs first though...