davidschroth | (no subject)

The week is almost over, and I wonder what I've accomplished. More than usual at work, I think. I got an emergency fix inspected and submitted for integration on Monday, beating the Tuesday deadline for making the next Final Tape (we've already had a Final Tape, so I guess this is the Final Final Tape. Probably followed by the Final Final Final Tape). Since the lack of the fix had as a consequence that various million dollar computer systems would either be crashing (best possible result) or silently corrupting data (worst possible result), this probably counts as A Good Thing. At least for my company and our customers. I should be pretty proud of myself - the bug was in an area I don't work in and that I'm not real familiar with. I found the problem when very few other people could have, and I did it on short notice and in about three or four hours. And I wrote the fix in less time than that. But I don't really feel anything about it now that it's done. Too many other "opportunites" to deal with. I also wrote and submitted for integration a fix for one of our diagnostic tools. Which is only fair, I did the Exec change that broke the tool. I didn't expect to get the fix written and working in three days, though. And I decided to get serious about a fix I've been playing with for a while, now. I got the fix working, and then I created and debugged alternates for the fix. The nastiest problem to find/fix was in an alternate where I deleted *most* of an existing routine when I had intended to delete all of the routine. The one line I didn't delete was a directive that changed the character radix. The results were subtly wrong , and could have been devastatingly wrong if the error had been integrated. So I integrated two fixes, and debugged a third and prepared it for code inspection. This probably counts as a pretty good week - and I'm losing ground. I'm pretty sure I have a half dozen fixes in various stages of development. Sometime, in the not too far distant future, I'll have to do some development effort for our next product. It would probably help if someone supplied me with requirements beforehand, but I have a pretty good idea of what I've got to do, regardless. I also need to start development of the product beyond our next product - I have no idea how I can ever get the work done in time. And the year is over one-third gone - I haven't worked on the stuff I'd hoped to work on, and I've probably put more time and effort into stuff that no one predicted.
And when I pour myself into work, I don't work on other stuff that needs doing. Badly.