This shot was taken at my family reunion on boxing day. Okay, okay. So it’s a little out of season. Big deal. It’s still cold out, right? See anyone you recognize? Click for a larger image.
Today was a long fcuking day (8:40-7:49, 1 hour break for lunch). But it was good. Made a lot of progress toward getting our release out the door.
Spent nearly the entire thing checking in last-minute changes to our change-repository system CVS. It’s a joy to use once you get the hang of it. It provides a great sense of security. With CVS, if you mess something up, you can always roll back to a previous — working — copy of a file. And CVS works with any kind of file, too — not just source code. We’ve got graphics and sound files checked into our CVS server too. While CVS is all that and a bag of chips, it’s just one more Good Thing that I need to remember to think about when I’m putting together a release of our software.
Probably the biggest pain in the arse is when people come up to you at the last minute, after you’ve just finished creating an installer, and tell you they need to change just one file. Or add a couple of files. And said person hasn’t checked said files into CVS. In fact, they don’t even use CVS — meaning I have to go through the process of checking the files in for them. And then, of course, that means their changes are associated with my name. The changes also mean the whole product needs to be rebuilt, and then, once it’s rebuilt, an whole new installer needs to be re-created.
Or, instead of a last-minute addition, maybe the biggest pain in the backside is when someone runs into a bug — but instead of entering it into Bugzilla, our bug tracking system, they walk over to me and tell me about the bug in person. That’s good, but if the bug was in Bugzilla too, then I could look at it later, come back, and mark it off as “done” or “postponed” or whatever, rather than trying the infinitely harder task of deciphering a pile quickly scribbled post-its.
This whole system could be very efficient. But it’s not. Yet.
Update: I ended up leaving work at 9:11! These long days have got to stop. I was there until 8:40pm on Friday, too. Too tired to shop for food and cook, so I got a footlong sweet onion chicken teryiaki on wheat from Subway instead.