Make progress every day.

[dougo]

I hate debugging. It's tedious, painstaking, and frustrating. It's like when you try to untie your shoelaces but you end up with a knot instead, and you have to sit and carefully untangle the knot when you just really want to get your damn shoe off.

What's worse is that once you finally fix a bug, no matter how sure you were that it was going to be the last one, there'll usually be another one hiding behind it. It's pretty much impossible to estimate just how many bugs are in your way—it could be one or a hundred, but there's no way to tell until you're done.

But it sure is a great feeling when you find out that you just fixed the last one! After finally getting this particular feature to work after three weeks (when I thought it would take one), now I can start actually using the feature and taking it for a spin. Wheeee!

(Minor bright side: now I know a lot more about online partial evaluation than I did before. Maybe someday it will come in handy again.)

Comments

[jtemperance.livejournal.com]

The absolute worst part of all of it is when managers at software development organizations try to pretend the process is predictable and hold you to firm deadlines.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, or graduate advisors.