A day in the life
Nov. 3rd, 2005 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaAnother demo, another long day's night, and I've been working like a dog...
Demo was due today, worked late again. Stacey caught a ride up with Julia, who was on her way to the airport and brought me a burrito. Worked until ~12:30 and then we walked to the train station to catch the 1AM train. Walked from that station to home, got home about 2AM, showered, went to bed. Had to be back in for a meeting on the code this morning at 8AM so I was up again at 6:30. Stace made me oatmeal and instant coffee and I was on my bike and back to the train. Caught the 7:30 train... As it turns out, there is one train in the morning that doesn't stop at the Palo Alto station... I ended up at the Melo Park station, road the train back to Palo Alto, got to work 5 minutes late for the meeting.
Now in a story, this is what we generally call foreshadowing. Of course, I forgot to mention that I had a pounding headache all day Wednesday. that was probably the real foreshadowing.
Anyhow, the demo was a disaster. :/ I'd worked and worked and got the code in great working order. Then I tried to integrate some of my co-worker's stuff into my project and didn't notice he had a class with the same name as one of mine. Netbeans did not like this at all and vomited all over the place, naturally about a half hour before the demo.
Now I'm not so foolish as to not keep a blessed backup of my code. So it barfed, I tried to start it back up, I realized everything was hosed, so I switched to my backup... And it was hosed too.... And the backup before that, and the one before that... F*** these were backups I'd not only backed up but tested. WTF! With the demo starting, I was totally paniced, had to go in with a version that was five versions out of date. FUCK! all the work I'd done this week to make the demo attractive and smooth and it was ALL gone...
Except it wasn't gone. After nearly throwing up at the demo, then having a nice crying jag as I walked back over to my office, I realized it wasn't possible that all of my backups were bad. Fucking Netbeans goddamned motherfucking Java piece of shit.
When I went to the project directory and into the 'build' directory I saw that most of the .class files hadn't been touched when I was despairately trying to reload my code. I nuked the class files and SUDDENLY EVERYTHING WAS FINE and I had my current demo back. Ran back to the meeting, caught them, and was able to resume the presentation. Still, a very sloppy way to present something to customers. I'm really embarassed and upset with myself. I stayed at work through lunch because I wanted to put one more bit of polish on it and I was overconfident in my backups and thought I could drop back ONE version if I needed to. Instead, I ended up making a fool of myself and leaving the guys to fast-talk on 'haha... You know how it is with computers..'. :( I guess all in all, the demo and presentations otherwise went okay but I feel like I blew it, like I let everyone down. My code was the entire software presentation and I presented it clumsily. :( I've never had a demo go so poorly. I always have my code ahead of where it needs to be for a demo and, while I've had to revert to an earlier version occassionally, it's 'older by a few hours', not 'older by a week'. :(
Let work about 3, not long after the demo, came home, played We <3 Katamaris (we bought it a few days ago, I haven't had time to play it) and Stacey made some rather delicious fajitas with these really beautiful red peppers we found at the korean market. Now I'm looking at the mess in my office space and my unfinished artwork and thinking I should get some work done. No rest for the wicked, you know.
Demo was due today, worked late again. Stacey caught a ride up with Julia, who was on her way to the airport and brought me a burrito. Worked until ~12:30 and then we walked to the train station to catch the 1AM train. Walked from that station to home, got home about 2AM, showered, went to bed. Had to be back in for a meeting on the code this morning at 8AM so I was up again at 6:30. Stace made me oatmeal and instant coffee and I was on my bike and back to the train. Caught the 7:30 train... As it turns out, there is one train in the morning that doesn't stop at the Palo Alto station... I ended up at the Melo Park station, road the train back to Palo Alto, got to work 5 minutes late for the meeting.
Now in a story, this is what we generally call foreshadowing. Of course, I forgot to mention that I had a pounding headache all day Wednesday. that was probably the real foreshadowing.
Anyhow, the demo was a disaster. :/ I'd worked and worked and got the code in great working order. Then I tried to integrate some of my co-worker's stuff into my project and didn't notice he had a class with the same name as one of mine. Netbeans did not like this at all and vomited all over the place, naturally about a half hour before the demo.
Now I'm not so foolish as to not keep a blessed backup of my code. So it barfed, I tried to start it back up, I realized everything was hosed, so I switched to my backup... And it was hosed too.... And the backup before that, and the one before that... F*** these were backups I'd not only backed up but tested. WTF! With the demo starting, I was totally paniced, had to go in with a version that was five versions out of date. FUCK! all the work I'd done this week to make the demo attractive and smooth and it was ALL gone...
Except it wasn't gone. After nearly throwing up at the demo, then having a nice crying jag as I walked back over to my office, I realized it wasn't possible that all of my backups were bad. Fucking Netbeans goddamned motherfucking Java piece of shit.
DEAR SUN CORP: WHEN I CLICK THE BUTTON THAT SAYS 'CLEAN AND REBUILD ALL' IT SHOULD PERHAPS FUCKING _CLEAN_ AND _REBUILD_ ALL, NOT DO NOTHING.
When I went to the project directory and into the 'build' directory I saw that most of the .class files hadn't been touched when I was despairately trying to reload my code. I nuked the class files and SUDDENLY EVERYTHING WAS FINE and I had my current demo back. Ran back to the meeting, caught them, and was able to resume the presentation. Still, a very sloppy way to present something to customers. I'm really embarassed and upset with myself. I stayed at work through lunch because I wanted to put one more bit of polish on it and I was overconfident in my backups and thought I could drop back ONE version if I needed to. Instead, I ended up making a fool of myself and leaving the guys to fast-talk on 'haha... You know how it is with computers..'. :( I guess all in all, the demo and presentations otherwise went okay but I feel like I blew it, like I let everyone down. My code was the entire software presentation and I presented it clumsily. :( I've never had a demo go so poorly. I always have my code ahead of where it needs to be for a demo and, while I've had to revert to an earlier version occassionally, it's 'older by a few hours', not 'older by a week'. :(
Let work about 3, not long after the demo, came home, played We <3 Katamaris (we bought it a few days ago, I haven't had time to play it) and Stacey made some rather delicious fajitas with these really beautiful red peppers we found at the korean market. Now I'm looking at the mess in my office space and my unfinished artwork and thinking I should get some work done. No rest for the wicked, you know.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-04 04:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-04 08:15 pm (UTC)Basically it's an IDE for Java. You create your project in it and it gives you a way to manage your source files. It also provides a GUI way to build your GUI so rather than typing in all the stuff about screen components and where they go and such, you just drag-and-drop them. You can also then edit the code behind the button by clicking it in an edit mode and say 'When I click the button, do this. When I double-click the button, do that.'. it also does some automatic commenting for JavaDoc and you can do things like display a window with a class hierarchy tree so you can quickly find out what a class is derived from and which functions are from that class or a parent, and you can check the scope of variables and methods. Also, when editing code in a class, it has an option to pop up a drop-down for methods and class variables as you type so if you are calling MySpecialFunctionQwerty and you can't remember how to spell it, if you type as much as 'M', it will provide a drop-down with all your methods and variables starting with M and so on. It also changes the font so you know when you're in a comment or a "" or if you're using a reserved word, the line syntax isn't correct, etc. Plus you can debug and compile from inside the IDE.
Handy, but the tradeoff, of course is that it's glacially slow and while your routines might be okay, the IDE can sometimes get hosed up so that your project doesn't work properly. IDEs also sometimes munge up files by not saving them. I use IDEs sometimes but I honestly still just use plain old vi a lot.