Archive for February, 2007

Randomly Meaningful

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

The sky is blue with a fist full of white to grey gradient mottled clouds. It is beautiful. I don’t think that I’ve ever been happy to see the sun before. I honestly have to say that I have missed the blue roof on this room called Vancouver.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the grey sky too. However, the grey sky is a thoughtful sky. It is an introspective sky. It can start to weigh heavily on the soul. The blue sky is fun and bright. Even the sun seems beautiful, though as we all know it is out to kill me.

Last weekend Holly was away winter camping, which left me with a void of time to fill. I ended up playing World of Warcraft. It was pretty amazing, it actually felt like old times. Much more fun than it had been during the last couple of months that I had played before my hiatus. It was great to hang out with some of the old crew and go through some of the new 5-man content with them. It was very easy to slip back into the roll of tanking.

The really funny part of it all to me was that initially while leveling from 60-70 I had a hard time getting help from people in the guild. Some of my good friends in there did help me out along the way though which was nice. However after I hit 70 and decided it was time to start doing some dedicated instancing, I respecced to Protection. After the guild heard I was protection again the offers to go in groups have been flying in.

In other completely unrelated news, I found out today that I work in the same city that Joe Sackic was born in. THE Joe Sackic! The same guy who scored his 600th goal in the NHL last night… Man, that is cool.

I’m looking forward to moving in with Holly soon. It’s going to be great to get to see her every day :) There are certain things that I’m going to miss about living in the heart of downtown, like being able to go next door to the grocery store, across the street to the theatre, or three to five blocks to anything else. It is all pretty insignificant though, since I miss Holly more.

I think what it really comes down to is that I’ve been on my own for so long that I’ve grown very used to being independant. It’s kind of strange how life seems to go. You start out with your family and you are dependant on them for almost everything. Then you jump out into the world and try to figure out how to be independant. Then after you’ve figured that out you meet someone and settle down a little. You have to unlearn some of your independance and learn to let that person in. You have to learn to depend on them and to be there for them to depend on too. It all boils down to no longer being independant, which is a really wonderful thing.

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Bad Programming

Monday, February 12th, 2007

Bad programming is one of those things that really drives me nuts. I don’t mind when someone who doesn’t know how to program, and understands that they don’t know how to program, writes bad code. They’re learning. I can help them.

The real problem is when you’re working with a group of people and they all feel that they are great programmers and they understand perfectly what they are doing, when really they don’t.

The real problem I have with those people is that they are unable to accept that they don’t know what they are doing, and are not only unwilling to fix what they have done wrong, but most likely unable to as well. Of course, this means that I end up having to fix their problems.

Refactoring code can be fun. Fixing stupidity on the other had, rarely is.

Then, you pile on top of all of this the fact that because of how they have written their code, there is no way to easily fix it without rewriting the entire system and so you tend to end up with a hack (of course you promise yourself that you will fix it in preproduction next year, or when you have some down time, but that never happens).

The final straw, is that I sit here all day trying to get my work done, but generally fixing someone else’s. I’m here to answer questions. I’m more than willing to help people out. However, the questions don’t come and the people don’t ask. Because these questions are never asked, I end up working more and more.

Is it too much to ask for to work with a few smart, humble, people?

I had this at the start of my career in the middle of nowhere Nova Scotia. Everyone did their job. Everyone was open to criticism. If there was a problem, everyone checked their work first instead of telling everyone else that something broke and they need to fix it. As much as I didn’t like the overtime, or in some aspects the work atmosphere very much, that was hands down the best crew of programmers that I have ever worked with. I would be willing to pit the team of 11 programmers that I lead there against any other team of 25+ programmers I have ever worked on since. Without any doubt in my mind, that group of 11 would blow away that team of 25+.

I guess, in hockey terms, that team is the championship Oilers team from the 80’s. It was a collection of underappreciated and underpaid super stars who played for the love of the game. It was a team that played in an era with no clutching and grabbing, the game just flowed (there were many, MANY, fewer managers and levels of communication to go through). It was a team that got things done.

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