For the last week or so I have been working on a pretty significant software development project for the future. It didn’t start out that complicated - what it’s doing isn’t thatcomplicated, but what you can do with it iscomplicated, and it’s doing my head in.
I can’t explain exactly what I’m building (it’s all top secret), but I suppose an analogy might go some way towards helping you understanding my plight - and then feeling sorry for me.
The analogy
Imagine a set of magic dominoes.
Imagine you can make the dominoes listen to each other, so perhaps when one falls over, other related ones fall over too.
Imagine that standing a domino back up causes a different set of related dominoes to stand back up too.
Now try and make a domino topple out of them all, and verify that exactly what should have happened did happen.
Just for fun, let the domino topple go in multiple directions at once, and verify that it’s all behaving.
I had one small bug in the code this morning - something I forgot to implement - and the whole thing ground to a halt for 2 hours while I pulled most of my hair out, kicked the desk, and stared incredulously at my own code.
My mood this morning could therefore be described thusly;
9:00am - I hate computers
10:00am - Oh god, what have I built
11:00am - It’s going to be the death of me
12:00am - YAY! I win, I rule, I am the master of all I survey
This kind of grandstanding is pretty common when I solve something complicated usually punctuated with kicking myself away from my desk on my office chair, fists in the air, doing a mini celebration.
This morning the girl opposite nearly spat her tea out laughing at me.