Deadlines

I have a deadline today. Given that I’ve missed the last two, I think I should make this one.

Unfortunately, I have only one bug left. I don’t know that I can fix it.

Why not?

I wish it was lack of competency, or lack of skill, or lack of time.

No, it’s lack of documentation. I don’t have any information on how the legacy feature I’m reimplementing USED to work, so instead I’m having to guess, time and again, on what is supposed to happen. It’s a complicated logic problem to begin with, and a lack of any clue of how it’s supposed to work is unbelievably complicated.

It strikes me, however, that this should have been done some time prior to five months before shipping. It’s a piece of legacy backwards compatibility — why on earth wasn’t this worked on previously??

Work issues

1) A “Principal Development Lead” (aka parallel to my manager) responded to an external team (still within the company) in a very technical and architecture-related email thread with factually inaccurate information. It’s basically been decided that there wouldn’t be anything gained by correcting him, but… Apparently, my lead had already tried to have this conversation with him, but he didn’t believe him. On top of that, it doesn’t help!

2) I need to finish one more bug today; otherwise an additional bug gets tacked on for each of the next two days. Then I’ll be done. Yay for no regressions!

3) A manager brought in chocolate cake today. I can’t have any.

4) My diet is apparently working somewhat. My pants are almost falling off, and I forgot a belt. Abigail thought this was funny.

5) I had actual important stuff to talk about. I forgot it.