12 April 2001
Last year: I spent all day Tuesday drugged out of my mind. It felt really, really good.
I'm going to talk about work today. Sorry.
The project that I'm on is, in essense, a re-write of an old project from almost five years ago. We're moving it from a DOS to a WinCE hand-held device, making the whole process more user friendly, and cleaning up some glitches. It's a frustrating project in many, many ways.
To begin with, WinCE might be user friendly, but it sure as heck isn't programmer friendly. Microsoft, if they wanted to compete in the hand-held OS market, should really have built a new OS from scratch. It could have looked just like Windows, even, if they'd wanted. But it looks like instead, they took Windows and gutted it, crippling it in the process. And I'd like to get my hands on the jerk who decided that WinCE needed to be UNICODE compliant. What's wrong with ASCII? It's a perfectly good character set!
The Army process that this project is designed to assist is a confusing one, as well. As always, with the military, all explanations are so heavily laden with acronyms that all I can do are take notes, hoping that eventually I'll be able to get out my dictionary and translate it. There are steps within steps, things that seem to make no sense whatsoever - but we have to support them, because they're not about to change their processes just because they're pointless!
To make matters even worse, all of the programmers who wrote the original program five years ago are gone. Every last one of them. And while we have their code, we have precious little of the documentation for that original project. But every time my manager asks for clarifications, he's told something along the lines of, "You should know that already; you people wrote the original program!" Gah. Oh, and his manager is telling him to stop asking questions, because otherwise they're going to call our configuration management process into question. GAH!
Random doesn't have to suffer through this crap, because the process and flow is my problem. But he's having his own problems, as he tries to get the WinCE device to talk to the computer without the dubious benefit of ActiveSync.
The one tiny bright spot in all this is that I actually know personally two of the original programmers. I've been exchanging e-mail with one of them, hoping to clean up the Augean stable of confusion that's landed on my lap. But he's pretty busy with his own life and work, so I can only depend on him for so much. Yesterday, through a stroke of luck, I stumbled (almost literally) across a lot of old documentation, and wound up sorting through a six-inch-deep stack of files relating to this project.
Most of them weren't very helpful. So today, I'm back to the original task, which is attempting to reverse-engineer the old code in an attempt to figure out what it's supposed to accomplish. This is a time-consuming, frustrating, and extremely draining task which is not simplified by the lack of comments in the code.
The sick part is, I love every minute of it.
Even when I'm cursing and complaining, even when my brain feels like it's turned to mush and leaking out my ears, even when the sheer bureaucracy of it wants to make me scream. I went home a little early yesterday, which turned out to be good, because even while I was trying to unwind by reading, my brain refused to let go, refused to stop turning over the few pieces I've already figured out and trying to make them fit. I was drawing flow charts in my mind as I shampooed my hair this morning.
I can't stop. And I'm not sure I want to, anyway.
Word of the Day:
Augean stable - a condition or place marked by great accumulation of filth or corruption
Currently Reading:
- Soldiers Live by Glen Cook
Current Projects:
- Kris' afghan
- garden