Good Advice from T. Rex

Some of the best advice comes from parodies of Beatles songs.







Dinosaur Comics - February 18th, 2014 - awesome fun times!

Stuck? Review, Debug, Rebuild.

Just finished troubleshooting a very irritating bug.

In the process, I ran up against a couple of walls and got pretty frustrated. I ended up just setting it aside for awhile, since I was out of strategies to try. I think this was the best course of action for someone with my admittedly limited experience.

I asked a senior developer about it this morning, and he encouraged me to follow this flow in the future.

I don't know if it was something funny about my IDE or just the standard n00b problem of missing some important steps, but my current build of the project was pretty screwy. This caused an error when my C++ app tried to execute a script in SQL Server. Cleaning and doing a full rebuild was just the ticket.

So, when I don't know what to do next, I'm adding "full rebuild" to the list of options.

Lots of Code

I'm a little bit stunned to think of the sheer volume of code in the project that my machine is compiling right now. I'm on line 60,000 of... well, a really big number. So big that it has made my int roll over to negative twice so far.

What is even more striking -- sobering, even -- is that this code represents the lives of the people who work here. Most of their waking hours, on most days, for most of their lives, have been spent adding to this code. They have created it, perfected it, sweated and sighed over it... and now here I am, distilling it to machine-readable 1s and 0s in a matter of minutes.

With that thought in mind, and in honor of National Poetry at Work Day (here's a delightful infographic about it), I will quote a few lines of Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,	50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

But what are any of our lives, really, but a long, slow measuring out? And lines of C++ are as good a yardstick as coffee spoons, I reckon.